Letter from the Editor

Abstract

Although my tenure as Managing Editor has felt relatively short, for me it has been nothing less than invigorating. The first time I had ever heard of SOAR was around the first winter of the COVID pandemic, confined indoors to my home and hundreds of miles away from the campus I was supposed to be at. However, I had tried to keep some semblance of what a student nearing the second half of their undergraduate career was supposed to do, which was to talk about rigorous and meaningful academic opportunities with whichever professors actually knew me. I was unsure of where these conversations would take me as I had only talked to two teachers in the Sociology Department. With one of these professors, specifically Professor Awash, we discussed potential online opportunities for a student who wanted to pursue and prepare for graduate school or other post-graduation work. Out of the several listings he gave, he remembered one called SOAR. He stated, in what felt like a child listening to an elder recall an old mystical tale, about how this had been an academic journal that was the shining example of what a student would want to participate in. After this brief snippet, I was hooked. I asked him “what's going on with the journal now?” He said how, like with most clubs and organizations, they had essentially dissolved because of COVID. If I wanted this journal to be an experience, I had to help rebuild it from the ground up.