A true liberal arts education allows students to pursue passions outside of their strictly academic interests and ensures the integration of thought across many disciplines. Wake Forest is no stranger to this school of thought, and as a result, its community is well-rounded and cross-disciplinary in its approach to research and learning.

As our fellow Demon Deacons continue to push the boundaries of innovation and research, the staff at the Old Gold & Black thought that the time had come to follow suit and introduce a Science & Technology section in the pages of our student publication, beginning with this week’s issue.

In this section, our staff hopes to expand our coverage of campus news to better include the interests and pursuits of our STEM community and beyond. Whether it be acknowledging student-faculty research efforts or writing about things related to the Innovation Quarter, Wake Downtown and WakerSpace, we look forward to publishing articles that interest and highlight Deacons working hard in the STEM fields and beyond.

While the articles in this section will inevitably concern topics surrounding science and technology, they will still be written for a liberal arts readership. We hope to highlight the integration of science and tech into other fields, and focus on the cross-disciplinary nature of science and technology itself. Just as the rest of our publication is meant for a liberal arts audience, we will keep this identity constant within the pages of the new section, and do not intend to assume that our average reader has a doctorate degree in rocket science.

Additionally, we hope that those articles written for this section are interesting not only for STEM readers, but also for those who may be adjusting to the integration of technology into their own fields and lives. We intend to take the label “Science & Technology” quite liberally, and look forward to seeing what we are able to cover under the broad scope of innovation.

While we hope our readers learn from this section, we also hope that they consider contributing as writers as well. We may be biased, but we feel that writing for the student newspaper provides a great opportunity to develop one’s writing skills and learn to separate fact from hyperbole. Students studying the strict STEM fields should not shy away from developing those skills. Articles which take high-level science topics and explain them at a general level are beneficial not only for the writer to have written, but also for the reader to learn from.

We hope that we are able to accurately and effectively report on these high-level science and tech topics in order to educate readers as well as raise awareness of the hard work happening in the laboratories and offices of our Deacon STEM experts.

With the addition of this section, we hope to better serve the Wake Forest community with the evergrowing STEM presence on and off campus and hope to expand this to other disciplines and areas of study in the future.

We welcome feedback from our readers as we embark on this new venture, and hope that our publication continues to be dynamic as our culture expands.