A Fond Farewell

To all the Synapse readers and staff,

This will be my final piece as Synapse’s Editor-in-Chief — it's been a pleasure and privilege serving you this year.

I’m graduating before Synapse returns in the fall, and as this is the last week of publication before Synapse wraps for the summer, I wanted to give some reflections on the year.

This year we set out to highlight the depth and breadth of the UCSF student body, while navigating our first year as a digital media-only production.

With the new Diversity Spotlight column, new writers Francesca Aloisio and Sumitra Tatapudy have started telling in-depth stories of both UCSF students and faculty.

The ever-popular Humans of UCSF has given us snippets and snapshots of passions and stories from the UCSF community.

We also started tackling some hard issues like student activism and the administration’s continued attempts to grapple with the rising cost of living in San Francisco.

A number of writers, including Nicole Croom, Matthew Crimp, Maxwell Coyle and Manu Venkat, have kept us informed on the latest developments in the housing saga, health policy and scientific research.

We have also expanded our science communication section by partnering with the new science writing group at UCSF, NeuWrite.

And I’m pleased to say that from an analytics perspective — and as a scientist I do like analyzing data — we’re up about 30% in total pageviews per week from where we were at in the previous school year, and our social media following has increased by 25%.

I hope that means we’re doing some things right.

As we look to the future, I’m pleased to announce that while I’m graduating and moving on, two editors who have been tirelessly working behind the scenes, Elizabeth Hwang and Ariane Panzer, will be stepping up next year to take over as co-Editors-in-Chief.

They intend to continue improving and expanding Synapse, highlighting the voices, issues and passions of UCSF students.

Warm Regards,

Bryne Ulmschneider

Synapse: Editor-in-Chief