“Legacy. What is a Legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”

-Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Hamilton”

I have been thinking about legacy a lot these past couple of months, as this is my last semester as editor-in-chief and as a member of The Wright State Guardian. I have had some amazing experiences in the three years I have been with the publication, but my garden is full and my seeds are planted, and it’s time to watch them grow. There is something quite beautiful about legacy; it’s something you are constantly working on yet never quite consciously aware of until it’s time to till a new garden. If legacy is the seeds, then hope is the soil and growth is the water. 

Hope is a foundation to build off of, it’s the mindset that people, situations and even society can change and become better. That we can change and impact the world in a positive light. Without hope, one can get stuck in the status quo, which leads to the point of growth. Changing, healing, and fulfilling your dreams is not an easy process and it often requires a revaluation of the self and of tradition. In order to act on hope one must also grow, the soil and all the lovely plants in it cannot be fertile without water. 

These three together are not only the topics of this edition of Flight Magazine but are also concepts our community has struggled with since the COVID-19 pandemic. How do you build hope in a post pandemic world when people struggled and when life stood still? Do you dig yourself out of the pit to grow yourself and your community back up? Well as you will see in this edition, our Wright State and Dayton communities are resilient. Even though the campus and area have faced so much in the past couple of years, they found hope to rebuild and grew to rise to the occasion, creating a legacy that will last for many generations. We hope to capture this evolution on these pages. 

I want to personally thank all the community members and supporters who made this edition possible, and I want to thank all Guardian members, past, present and future, for helping me grow not only as a journalist but also as a person and for working hard to help this amazing community. I hope we all, myself included, will leave hope to build off of, an inspiration to grow and a positive, long-lasting legacy.

—Jamie Naylor
Editor-in-chief