Success can be a tireless job. Your parents call you on the phone to say “Congrats!” Your friends boast about your constant hustle. Your local paper reports on your infinite success. Your mom cuts out the article. She sticks it on the fridge — you’re a success.

(Oh geez, we really hope this happens for these 10.)

Success radiates from this year’s 10 Up-and-Comers — you can see it in the photos. Up-and-Comers — those nominated by their peers, faculty and members of the NYU community — are taking their skills out of the classroom and making waves in their fields. They sit next to us in our classes, rush uptown for their late night show internship or jet across the world to improve urban green spaces. They make the rest of us try to size up to their accomplishments and question, “Am I good enough?”

Thanks to all the students featured in this issue for working with our staff and letting them probe into your life, whether that be watching you make a video or trailing behind you on the subway. 

This issue wouldn’t exist without our great WSN staff — all of which are Up-and-Comers in their own right. To Sam Klein, Bela Kirpalani and Akshay Prabhushankar, thanks for not only writing but spending the countless hours with us in the office working on this issue and any other issues — newspaper and personal. Thanks to our writers Hanna Khosravi, Meghna Maharishi, Melanie Pineda and Victor Porcelli for dedicating your time and words. To Natalie Chinn and Yasmin Gulec, without your hundreds of Google doc comments, some of these pieces wouldn’t have gotten the editing facelifts they needed. (Also, shoutout to Yasmin for writing — even though she does that in her sleep.)

The creative duo of Priya Tharwala and Sophia Di Iorio made our pages come to life with their designs. You both have great patience when InDesign crashes a thousand times on nights like this.

Katie Peurrung and Justin Park, our Under the Arch multimedia team, led the photoshoots for this issue and somehow managed to turn the WSN office into a studio. Thanks for giving us an excuse to turn the lights off at work for a few hours.

To our multimedia team, led by Alana Beyer, thanks for chasing around the Up-and-Comers and our writers. Keep running and capturing because without your photos, who would read all those words?

Last but not least, who could forget about our loquacious copy desk? Without your colorful conversations about Lyndon B. Johnson amid your feverish copy editing, our paper would be one grammatical mess.

Have fun flipping through this issue — maybe you’ll see your name next year.

— Pamela Jew and Sakshi Venkatraman