Letter From the Editor
Looks like you’ve decided to pick up this magazine. I guess that makes
you a vagabond. But what is a vagabond?
A vagabond is a wanderer. A roamer. A nomad. Someone who lives a
life on the road, never settling down in one place.
But perhaps when you hear the word “vagabond” some negative
connotations also come to mind. A bum. Worthless. Unreliable. Why
is that?
Let’s instead try to think about the many virtues of a life of wandering
– intellectual wandering. Listen to that favorite graduation gift: “Oh,
the places you’ll go!” See as much as you can see! Learn as much as
you can learn! After all, we’re all here together at a public university.
A 1,232-acre space full of libraries and lecture halls and stages and
classrooms in which you’ll find thousands of professors and students,
all united under one purpose: to learn. When you stop and think about
it, that’s a pretty beautiful thing.
The 2013-2014 Vagabond Staff has worked tirelessly all semester to
bring you this fall’s issue, but the real essence of Vagabond is in the
creative contributors. In the following pages you will find pieces written
by the professors and students in those lecture halls, as well as in lecture
halls elsewhere. Written in just a few of the nearly 7,000 languages in
the world (each with an English translation), we hope reading these
pieces will give you a glimpse into the breadth and depth of experience
present even in our small corner of the world, and perhaps inspire that
little piece of vagabond that’s in all of us.
From your editor,
Gigi Gilbert-Igelsrud
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