By Aidan Joly, Editor-in-Chief
One of three layout editors for The Griffin, Sara Umbrell, is a junior at Canisius and is in her first year on the staff of The Griffin.
Umbrell, who is from central Massachusetts, near Worcester, originally attended Washington State University, but decided that it was too far from home and ended up transferring to Canisius. In her initial search, Canisius was her second choice of school.
“I didn’t go [to Canisius] originally because I wanted a rural campus, not really an urban campus,” she said.
An animal behavior, ecology, and conservation and environmental studies double major, she decided to join The Griffin this year for a new experience. On top of that, her brother, who graduated from Fordham in 2020, was on the paper there as well, so she wanted to try it out.
“It was just something new that I hadn’t really done and I thought it would be kind of interesting to try because my brother did the newspaper for his school and really enjoyed it,” she said.
Umbrell says that she is not a writing person, so being one of the three layout editors on staff was something that she was really interested in doing and she has been able to learn a lot in her short time on staff so far. Now, her main duties as one of the three is to lay out the opinion section.
“I saw something about it, I can’t remember where, and I thought, ‘Oh that looks interesting; something new,’ so I decided I’ll try it,” Umbrell said. “I’m not a big writer, and that wasn’t writing.”
She has really enjoyed her time on staff so far and getting to know everybody, as well as the opportunity to learn the new software that she was unfamiliar with before joining The Griffin.
“I’ve never had to learn anything like that, so that has been kind of a neat experience,” she said. In the future, she hopes her role can expand. “I was going to go through the semester and let it play out and see how I felt at the end, but I’m definitely enjoying it so far and I definitely want to keep doing it.”
In her free time when she is not doing work for The Griffin or schoolwork, Umbrell enjoys spending time outside in addition to cooking and baking.