A Love Letter to the Salient Reader

You might be picking this magazine up for the first time, or this might be the 61st issue you’ve flicked through. Whether you’re a new reader of Salient, or a fan since third-year: welcome. This is our love letter to you. 

Each week, we pour our hearts into producing 40 pages of content just for you. We want you to be informed, enraged, engaged, and ultimately, feel seen. We love seeing cut-up Salient pages  on bedroom walls in the back of IG selfies or TikToks. We smile when we see a group reading their weekly horoscopes together. Salient is a labour of love for you, and for us. 

A lot of us leave our family for the first time to come to university, branching out into a sea of a million potential new connections. While RAs joke that ⅓ of us will find our future spouse during our time at university, we are more likely to stumble into chosen families: friends who prove that water is sometimes thicker than blood, and who surround us with love while we find our way through our tumultuous twenties. For many of us who work for this magazine, Salient becomes this kind of adoptive family.  

Romantic love seems to get all the big hype. Love actually (go watch Love Actually) comes in a variety of different forms. The love we have for our passions, projects, or future prospects is what carries us through our hospo jobs and compulsory Stats courses. Especially for those of us who studied during the Covid era, the usual abundance of new connections were at times few and far between. 

But the most magical type of connection you can find at uni is often not within halls or at Eyegum or at student night, but over a shared love for a subject. Fran can confirm that the vulnerability of a Creative Writing course is the perfect place for finding platonic soulmates, while Maia’s day one connection with someone over shared majors lasted an entire degree of late-night library study sessions.

It’s cheesy (but we love cheese here at Salient, so suck it), and as much as we have a complicated relationship with it, this university will always hold a soft spot in our hearts. It’s where our adult lives and careers truly began. Being an academic, say what you will, is romantic as shit. Imagine devoting your life to a subject just because you love it so much, that you’ll spend three-plus years exploring it. (This has turned into an editorial for the nerds.) Even if you don’t feel that connected to your degree, at least you now have a bunch of random facts to pull out at your next speed dating event. Yeehaw! 

In the ‘Cupid’ issue, Lauren evaluates relationships against the post-university travel plunge, asking if commitment can co-exist with self-exploration. Phoebe helps you level up your love life with flowers (In the words of SZA: ”It’s cuffing season / I need a big…” bouquet). If the connection you’re looking for is more with yourself than another situationship, Georgia helps you navigate hooking up without the heartbreak. Finally, Zoe tells us about the experience of being the only one who isn’t madly crushed-up. 

A lot has happened on campus while students haven’t been here: the university announced a swath of staff cuts and departments to be disestablished, to a reception of protests and calls for a moratorium. The News section takes you through the last month of developments with this debt-ridden university—with extra reporting from Maia about the Living Pā, and Ethan (Jr) gets to the bottom of @NZSTYLE on TikTok. 

Buy yourself some flowers this week kiddo, and best of luck for the first week of Trimester 2.  Also, Salient Wizard warns you, be careful with your flings and boo tings as Venus is in Leo: a special time for self-love. 

xoxo

Salient’s own Cupid and Psyche