I never thought I would be working for The Sunflower. I won’t lie. I actively avoided it for my first two years of college. I came into college as some broadcast journalism kid from Wichita Southeast who was too good for print.
I wanted to operate bazooka-sized cameras and run a broadcast show like I did in high school.
Then I realized that the broadcast class didn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for a while. I was lost. I had nowhere to go, and I was working at Fatburger. Fatburger was struggling just to cover payroll, and when they closed in May 2024, I lost my job.
No job, no internships and not much to show for a journalism career. I thought I would be a lot further down the line, but it never happened.
So I joined The Sunflower in July 2024. I had no print experience and haven’t done video journalism in two years. I had one documentary that I made for an art class, and no resume to speak of.
I felt like I was walking into a bar full of nothing but broken dreams.
Allison Campbell, the editor-in-chief at the time, took a flyer on me that summer, and I am ever grateful for it. At first, I thought I was going to be the video guy for the newspaper. It didn’t work out that way; we just weren’t ready to take that leap forward yet.
I started writing for sports since that was my forte back in high school. It was stressful, but I started having fun writing and being in journalism again after two years. Former Sports Editor Jacob Unruh taught me a lot of things about writing for such a large audience.
I didn’t venture outside of the sports section my first year, and I wasn’t yet a photographer. Then I took that next step this year, my final year. I haven’t written nearly as much as I wanted to this year, but I fell in love with the camera again, in a less bazooka-sized capacity.
I thank The Sunflower for giving me this opportunity, because I don’t think I would still be in school at this point without it.
Spending those production nights joking about my casino job and opening Counter-Strike cases. Being the on-call guy and covering crazy stuff was fun. I’d do it again, I just wish I’d done it earlier.
Goodbye,
Evan Tong
