To our dearest readers, Welcome back to a brand new school year! Though the school year isn’t exactly new anymore, we hope all of you have had your fair share of whimsy as we head into the summative season filled with doom and despair during the month of December. And just a fun little introduction: We are juniors Utshaho Gupta, Sarani Sams, and Brigitte Zhang, your Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-2026 AIS Newspaper. With Sarani’s constant objection to every article idea, Uts

i stare at A Guide to Course Registration half-bitten nails dig into the skin above my elbow the living room couch is barely visible under the scattered rainbow highlighters—half-capped half-crumpled sheets of class schedules, course catalogs, syllabi and piles of creased, bullet point sticky notes covered in scattered attempts at planning (the next four years of) my life.