Four years goes by much too quickly. Now, in 500 words or less, I am supposed to convey something moving and insightful about my time here at Stanford. So I guess I am going to write about my experience here at The Daily.

Since my freshman year I have held an amalgam of positions on this paper -- each with its own quirks and unique perspective. As a staff writer I wrote news articles and concert reviews. As a columnist I attempted to provide simple and prudent advice on how to best take advantage of technology in your day-to-day lives. Last Spring I became a part-time political pundit -- I went to D.C. and tried my hat as a Washington correspondent. Astute readers may even recall my failed one-week stint as a news editor. All of these experiences have been personally rewarding -- if not high-paying. Hopefully they have enlightened discourse on campus or, at the very least, provided you with some reading material during a boring lecture.

My favorite job at The Daily has been serving on the editorial board -- that mighty and mysterious body that meets regularly to draft anonymous staff editorials on behalf of all Stanford students. For the past 5 months I have been engaged in passionate debates with my esteemed editorial colleagues. This is actually quite fun. Should the notorious caterpillars be eradicated? If so, how? What are the relative merits of the proliferation of four latter acronyms and abbreviations on this campus? What do we think of McCain's democracy speech on campus? What should our foreign policy be on Iran and why hasn't Lake Lag been filled already? And... Gioia who? No issue is too large or small for debate, and no piece of campus gossip or heresy is excluded from consideration.

My brief tenure on the editorial board, however, provided me a unique insight into why this campus is so ridiculously cool. Members of the Stanford community have a way of passionately taking up issues and then carrying them through. Part of the fun of being on the editorial board has been commending these individuals when they succeed. In the past year a group of Stanford students got together and decided to do something about climate change. So they organized a world class conference and brought in experts form around the globe. They elicited national media attention and cemented a growing consensus on campus that Stanford needs to be world leader in promoting sustainability and clean energy. On the editorial board, I get the preposterous honor of telling them what an awesome job they did!

Going to Stanford is a little bit like living in a perpetual "Pinky and the Brain" episode. Everywhere you turn, Stanford students and professors are off doing crazy interesting things. This is a community fostered around individuals who go follow their passions. That's pretty cool and I'm proud to be a part of it.

It is even more of honor to contribute to that community via a paper like The Daily which is filled with witty comedic geniuses such as Katie Taylor and Darren Franich. I humbly hope I have elicited some small fractions of the number of laughs that their writing has produced over the years.

I'm grateful for a lot of friends and mentors here at Stanford and I sure am going to miss this place. It's been good times. Thanks for reading!

Andrew Leifer is leaving for Boston where he will learn to speak like Matt Damon and hopefully complete a Ph.D. in Biophysics. He can be reached at leifer@fas.harvard.edu.