This digital age that we have cultivated demands immediacy — we scroll, think and live rapidly. We have lost the art of living in the moment, and we throw time around like there is an abundance of it. Time will rush past you if you aren’t careful. I know because I wasn’t, and May came stumbling in, unannounced, while my mind was still in August. 

In my photojournalism classes, I spent many days listening to the phrase “give yourself the gift of time” as it echoed through the minds of the peers who would soon enough become my friends. Go early, stay late and give ourselves time to make good images for our portfolios. So I did just that. I spent all day in a tractor photographing a farmer, and arrived early to football games to photograph the team huddle in the locker room before the game even began. 

However, I also gave myself the gift of time to grow, experience and prosper into the person I am today.  

Let’s start by going back in time to four years ago when my feet first hit the floor of the Communications Building. I had zero intention of doing anything news related. I figured I would fly through the whole college thing on the notion that I would become a sports photographer. A month into freshman year, I was on staff at the Daily Egyptian begrudgingly doing news and hoping a sports photo assignment had my name on it.  

Eventually, I led a desk of photographers as sports photo editor, and then the entire staff of photographers as photo editor. Then, I was granted the title of editor-in-chief of the DE. Through all of this, somewhere in the mix, I became a photojournalist. 

Did I ever expect that I was going to work in news? No. But humans are easily influenced creatures, and being surrounded by good, passionate people will do that to you. Somewhere out there exists a clipping of me in my hometown newspaper from when I won a photo essay contest in first grade …  So in hindsight, it should have been obvious when I decided I wanted this to define my entire life. 

In the spring of my sophomore year, our professor (and this year’s teacher of the year!) Julia Rendleman told us we’d be spending an entire weekend documenting Alto Pass and Cobden for SIU’s annual Weekend Workshop — a program she revived from the ashes.  

Through the pit in my stomach and my white knuckles trembling on my steering wheel, that weekend changed my life. I think it shaped me to the very person I am today. To be in one space, for over 48 hours, with dozens of people who are all passionate about visual storytelling is extremely moving — it is this transformative experience that one might spend the rest of their life trying to feel again.

That weekend is when I knew I wanted to be a photojournalist, and that weekend made me a finalist in College Photographer of the Year — which was a surreal moment, too. 

Following the Weekend Workshop, time marched on and the inevitable soul-searching experience that college forces you to endure finally hit me. This journalist thing is pretty life-changing. 

There is a very intimate and retrospective nature to journalism that I have grown to understand and cherish. Getting a firsthand look at people, their lives and the things that make them human. Getting the privilege to tell their stories. Journalists even get a front row seat to history, as they say. 

This job, standing behind a camera, is a privilege and the greatest gift life has given me. 

I traveled to South America for the first time when I went to report in Peru as a Pulitzer Center fellow last June. I saw parts of the world I hadn’t ever imagined seeing and spent time in the home of a family as they hummed me a soft song from church on a guitar, though we couldn’t speak the same language. 

Despite being a life-long Illinois resident, I visited Chicago for the first time because of SIU and the journalism school. I had never been to Washington D.C., and now I’ve been twice. 

Outside of the classroom, I worked closely with Julia and professor Molly Parker for a year and a half on an environment story about the climate and resilience of agriculture. That experience taught me a lot of things, and is one of the best bodies of work I am walking away with. Julia has taught me to be the best photojournalist I could be today, and I wouldn’t have had the learning experience that I did without her contagious passion for photojournalism. Molly and her classes have made me a better writer, which has always been a daunting task for me, so I am beyond thankful. They both changed my life and this program in wonderful ways. 

The beginning of my junior year began my tenure as editor-in-chief, which spanned into my senior year. And with that came the introduction of our astonishing faculty editor Alee Quick. I learned how to lead, how to manage and how to produce a newspaper. Many late nights of my life were spent trying to figure this all out. We managed to turn this newspaper into a leading source of news for the region to help revive this vast news desert. Alee makes us all at the DE a little better than we were the day before, and for that we owe her the utmost praise and respect. Thank you for being here. 

I have much gratitude for the entire DE staff who let me guide them. Thank you all for listening to me, and teaching me more than you could have ever imagined.

The summer before my senior year, I interned at the St. Louis Public Radio where nearly every day I photographed the kind-hearted people of St. Louis under the guidance of SIU alum Brian Munoz, who taught me well. I stood in the midst of events like Black rodeos and the Savannah Bananas baseball game at Busch Stadium. It felt really surreal to stand in the Cardinals’ photo well as a lifelong fan of the birds. I am forever thankful to Brian and the entire STLPR staff who welcomed me in and gave me the best summer I could have asked for. 

I learned through these experiences how important news is to a functioning democracy — and how vital our role is as young journalists to keep it going.

More time was spent in the Communications Building than it was at my own home, and I have taken more photos than I can even count. All that time and button pushing gave me some level of knowledge that I will take with me wherever I go. 

I am not the same person I was as a freshman, and I won’t be the same person even a year from now, but I’ve learned that is the beautiful thing about time and life. We are constantly evolving. 

The friends I found made these four years the best I could have asked for. And I am privileged to have too many people to name one by one here, so I won’t. But just know you all changed my life. My dear family who went a lot of time not hearing from me at all because I got a little too busy — thank you for believing in me.

I can’t write about my college experience without talking about my grandma, Victoria, who gave me my first ever DSLR camera. She passed away over this past Christmas break, and the last thing we ever spoke about was me telling her to mark May 9 on her calendar for my graduation. She had a kind spirit and I would wish for nothing else than for her to be here, but I know I made her proud. 

The time spent here at SIU has prepared me well, and at the end of May I will leave my breathtaking southern Illinois home behind for the bluegrass state where I am thrilled to be the 2026 Project 306.36 Tim Dillon Visual Storytelling grant recipient for Boyd’s Station in Harrison County, Kentucky. 

I am leaving with work published in publications like ProPublica, Reuters, Capitol News Illinois and NPR — all before I even received my diploma. What a top-notch education I have been lucky enough to experience. 

But out of all the things I was taught in and out of the classroom, the best thing I learned is that there is an abundance of love here. 

My time at SIU was never about the physicality of my degree — because love was never found in my good grades or whether I made the dean’s list or not. 

Love is heard in the laughter that comes from the living room in my college apartment. And it’s felt sitting in my favorite classes surrounded by my newfound best friends. It is found in the busy DE newsroom late at night putting together this very newspaper. It’s found on a warm Carbondale evening watching my friends converse over a cigarette. 

Love has always been in my photos and bylines that appeared in this paper for the last four years.  

Though I grew up 20 miles up the road, I dreaded leaving high school and my home for an experience unknown to me because I was afraid I wouldn’t love it. Now, Carbondale has become a home full of love and I am dreading leaving it, too. 

This place has sometimes begged for me to hate it — hate its cracked walls and its warped bulletin boards. But, even if I tried to hate it here, the warmth of the people and opportunities that occupy this space have always beckoned me back.  

Time heals all, and love brings us back home, eventually. 

My time here has been eye-openingly beautiful and everything I could have asked for. To anyone reading this who still has time here — I hope you are in tune with the moments before you. I am forever indebted to this place and the people. 

“The world owes us nothing, and we owe each other the world,” – Ani Di Franco. 

Senior editor Lylee Gibbs can be reached at [email protected] or on Instagram @lyleegibbsphoto

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