We’re all facing our own identity crisis.
Though we may refute it, every day we hope to find the true key in the search for who we are as individuals. Our ability to inform ourselves every day in turn informs the kind of person we want to be in the eyes of others. At The Medium, we face the same struggle daily. When trying to put together themes and ideas for this magazine, it took a while to come to a concrete idea. We knew we wanted to tell our readers a story and open their mind to something different, but we did not know at the time what it was.
Months later, we have what you are holding in your hands right now. In an attempt to understand who we are at The Medium, we decided to bring to you a collection of pieces that offer you the chance to understand, debate, and most importantly be informed.
Staying informed is a phrase that gets thrown around in our news room. We have always talked about what that could mean, and have had lengthy debates about what our job really is here at UTM. We could easily be a paper that presents itself as uninformative and aim to simply appeal to a greater public—but we don’t. Our understanding of staying informed is also combined with the ability to understand who we are as UTM students.
Using the information you have learned has, in many ways, shaped your beliefs, your personality, your understanding of the world, and generally who you are. The ability to stay informed goes beyond just hearing information in passing; it also means pursuing knowledge and using it to better yourself, debate, and to push for change.
Your responsibility as a student at UTM is rooted in the idea that you need to think critically about various concepts. University pushes this idea day in and day out. Though, your responsibility as a student at UTM extends beyond that; you should get involved and be aware of how your money is spent. Blindly passing through the campus while paying little to no attention to the happenings around you will let you graduate with no worries, which is easy to do. However you will also be missing the essential skill of being informed.
Our magazine hopes to ignite that flame inside you to truly invest time in learning about yourself and the environment around you. With knowledge comes criticism and with criticism comes the ability to have a more in-depth understanding of institutions, communities, ideologies, and so much more. There’s always more behind the clean marketing of our institutions, and you have the right to know about that.
Know that our aim with every minute we spent on this magazine was to inform you. To teach you about what it means to create your identity and to pursue knowledge, all while trying to maintain so many other things in your life. The future has so much in store for us, but your future is dependent on what you do to better yourself now. Our role for this campus at The Medium will and always has been to pursue knowledge and share it with the UTM community. You deserve to know and you deserve to seek it. My hope is that you will read through these articles and learn something. You will learn and you will take that knowledge to understand who you are.
I cannot promise you that you will find out the answer to the question of identity, but I can promise you that you will finish this magazine with a little more knowledge than you did before. The journalists who wrote the articles certainly hope that you do.
Putting together in a few words what my team has been able to do with this magazine was a difficult thing to do. I cannot even begin to express my gratitude to my team who put this together, in just the words I have written here. Thank you to my team, for the honourable and outstanding work you’ve done this year for this magazine and for our weekly issues. You truly have pushed The Medium into a direction it hasn’t gone before. We have worked tirelessly in hopes that you will enjoy the work you’re about read. Share and be part of the knowledge they have worked to give you. Pass it on to others and understand the importance of being aware of your campus, always.
Without knowledge, you cannot have identity. Without identity, UTM does not have you.
Stay critical and informed UTM. Embrace the information and journey you are about to embark on.
Yours,
Mahmoud
