Hello Everyone!

There have been multiple times this year where I would get into a line, and then immediately after the line would get cut off, making me the last person before the cut off. It’s already happened 4 or 5 times so far, and it’s making me sense a pattern. Therefore, I am hereby anointing 2026 as the year of barely getting by.

That being said, let’s find out what’s up with Will…

I might have already said this at some point in the past year, but I always have romanticized the beginning of a new semester. The start of the school year is full of new possibilities. I get to see new faces as well as familiar ones, and I get to experience new opportunities to learn and grow from. You can always treat the new semester with rose colored glasses, as it doesn’t come with the responsibilities that later on in the semester have.

I spent all this week running around campus getting everything in order. I picked up my keys to the copier room (I think I finally know what true power feels like), found my classrooms, and I went to the career development center to get a professional headshot for my very own SFSU faculty page! He’s beauty, He’s grace.

This, of course, is all leading up to me saying that I have officially started teaching communication/public speaking, and I love it so far!!!! My class time slot is later in the day, so I was worried about overall class engagement, but there seems to be good class participation. This first week was focused mostly on building class community and covering things like the syllabus (so like every other first week of school). But it was MY first syllabus week on the other side of the classroom, so I had a little bit of extra sparkle in my eyes as I talked about assignments, classroom policies, etc.

Here are some of the highlights from that class:

We did a free write (a timed writing assignment focused on a particular prompt encouraging students to get their thoughts out onto a page), and I asked for music suggestions. No one was giving any suggestions, so I said, “Y’all don’t want me selecting the music as my genre of choice is exclusively teenage girl pop”. Still, no one spoke up, so for the free write assignment, we listened to “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus. I really gave them a chance…

I had a lecture on language, and, while talking about slang, I asked if anyone had any they wanted to share. One student said “reheating the nachos”, which the student told me it meant when a celebrity or other famous person rewears an outfit. After some further research, it seems that the phrase can also refer to when someone reuses an idea or an aesthetic. Aren’t you glad you have the What’s Up With Will newsletter to keep you up to date with what the cool kids say?

(Side note: Research shows that only 10% of all slang words are still in use after 15 years. I can only hope that 15 years from now, we as a society are still saying reheating the nachos.)

On the second day of class, we did a Jeopardy-style syllabus quiz, breaking students into teams, and whoever won got extra credit points. I was honored when one group of students decided that their name would be Team William Willis!

Lastly, one of my students called me Mr. Willis. I figured it was going to happen…

I am taking two graduate classes this semester. The first one is a class on communication and gender studies, with an emphasis on Asian American Gender Studies. This class is more specific than I was originally expecting, but I still believe the class will be interesting, as it will be my first foray into gender studies. Right in the middle of this class, we began to be serenaded by cello music.

The other class that I am taking is a mixed-methods research class, covering how to actually research from a communication studies perspective. This class is supposed to cover observations, interviewing, visual/media artifacts, and analysis. What’s also cool is that the professor said that we would be able to take on the research topic of our choosing. I know last semester I wrote a literature review on critical pedagogy, but I am open to exploring other things.

My dad, brother, and I decided to pack up our bags and go to Vegas for the weekend. You can’t tell anyone (because I’ll deny it), but I am actually going to let you in on what happened in Vegas.

We started our day on Friday by hitting up the sports book for some clean old-fashioned horse race betting. For some reason, Planet Hollywood is the only sports book in Vegas that simulcasts horse racing. However, with the rise of online gambling and the decentralization of sports betting to a particular place, the actual sports book attendants seem to be feeling the pressure. We have found that if you tip them a little bit, they will give you non-stop free drink tickets. I think this trip, they ended up giving us 15-20 drink tickets.

What I think is interesting about horse racing is that while at the end of the day, anything can happen, the sports book will give you a daily race forum containing a boatload of statistics of the horses racing. You can track the races that they have been in, what place they got, how long the race was, and how competitive that race was. So we spent our day poring over the pages, hoping to find a diamond in the rough.

Besides the horse racing, the majority of the trip was spent going around to casinos along the Vegas Strip and Downtown. I played mostly Craps as it’s one of the most interactive games, and I love the collective “everyone bets together against the house” mindset that emerges.

We did a couple of non-gambling things (I know, surprising). The first was the Mob Museum, housed in a restored federal courthouse and post office. The museum traces the history of organized crime in the United States, beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It documents the rise of American mob bosses and highlights the Kefauver Hearings, which brought national attention to organized crime (one of those hearings was actually held in the very building that now houses the museum). However, the section I found most interesting focused on Las Vegas’s transformation into the city it is today.

Originally established as a ranching settlement in 1865, Las Vegas began to grow rapidly in 1905 when it became a railroad town, positioned as a midpoint between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. Almost immediately after the railroad arrived, the city’s first red-light district, Block 16, emerged, signaling the beginnings of Vegas. Las Vegas continued to grow due to Nevada’s lax enforcement of Prohibition, followed by the legalization of wide-open gambling and quick divorces in 1931, and the economic impact of the Hoover Dam’s construction. These developments attracted tourists, workers, and investors, setting the stage for the city’s reinvention. A major turning point came with the opening of the Flamingo Hotel in 1946, owned by Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, which established a new standard for luxury casino resorts and helped define the modern Las Vegas Strip.

The second was a Vegas Golden Knights Game vs the Seattle Kraken.

As we walked into the game, I could not help but notice another 40ft sculpture of a woman. This sculpture, Bliss Dance, was done by Marco Cochrane (the same artist who created the 40ft woman sculpture in SF).

I have never been a big hockey fan, but the Golden Knights had one of the wildest sports experiences ever. It starts with the pre-show, where a golden Knight sword fights rival knights and a dragon that is projected onto the ice. Then, in between periods, a DJ comes out and turns the rink into a club. And whenever the opposing team got a foul, the whole stadium would start chanting “Shame!” Unfortunately, Seattle got the upper hand, slaying the Knights 3-2. On the upside, they handed out free cups! Huzzah!

Going to a hockey game around the same time as “Heated Rivalry”’s popularity is skyrocketing was purely coincidental. In fact, my dad grew up going to hockey games, so this is a classic “I was a fan before it became cool”.

Don’t be fooled by this picture; we did not win a million dollars. The Casino Binion’s does let you take a photo with it to imagine winning big in Vegas. One of these days, we are going to win it big. Regardless, it was a great trip. The truth is, the Willis boys do not get to spend time together like we once did (especially with all of us across the country now), and I’m happy that we were all able to take time out of our busy schedules to meet up. It’s what made the trip so special (that and the fact that a Bluey impersonator walked up to me on the Strip and said “67”. I love that I have a vibe that encourages that.)

It was kind of auspicious that my newsletter started one year ago with then to now. To see me at a point in my life when I was trying to figure out the steps to become a teacher, to see just one year later, already starting to achieve that goal, is pretty incredible. I get to look back at every step along the way!

I wanted to analyze my newsletter, analyzing the word count and image count for each post. For this analysis, the end of the word count and image count for this post ends at the line above this paragraph. Here is what I found over the course of 53 posts for this year:

The total word count for the year was 79,458. To put this into perspective, this is approximately the same amount of writing as a 290-320 page novel!

The total image count for the year was 1398.

On average, the word count per post is 1499.2. The average image count per post is 26.4. So, that is the platonic ideal of a What’s Up With Will Newsletter post.

On average, there is one picture for every 57 words (56.84).

The range for word count and image count was 1844 and 67 images.

The quartiles for the range data are as follows:

However, the median word count and image count are 1478 and 24, respectively. So, even though there is a lot of variability in my word count and image count over the year, it held pretty consistently.

Interestingly, there were two newsletters with the exact same word count of 1323. These newsletters are post #17: ✍️ When One Newsletter Ends... 5/26/25, and post #22: 😢 Aloha Hawaiʻi 6/29/25. This is probably the most interesting stat that I found.

There were five newsletters with 20 images. These are post #7:🍀 Pinball, Pi, and St. Patrick's Day 3/16/25, post #15: 🔥 Hot Takes and Tangents 5/11/25, post #30: 😴 I Dreamed Big... 8/24/25, post #37: 🧠 Creating My Philosophy 10/12/25, and post #46: ❄️A Winter Wonderland 12/14/25.

The post with the most words is post #51: 👨‍🏫 Instructor William 1/18/25, with a whopping 2395 words. This makes sense because  I did a lot, but was also on break, so I had the time to really write and go as in-depth as I wanted to. It’s also at the end of the year, and I have grown as a writer (I think, haha).

The post with the most images is post #16: 🍴 When in (Insert City Name Here)... 5/18/25, with 72 images. This was the week when Rylee graduated, and we visited Mystic, Boston, and Chicago, so it makes sense that there are a lot of pictures.

The post with the fewest words is post #2: 🏈 Super Bowl Sunday! 2/9/25, with 551. This was one of my first posts. I was figuring things out and experimenting with how I wanted this newsletter to be.

The post with the fewest images is post #47: ✅ Finally Done! 12/21/25, with 5. This was finals week, so I had no time to do things for a newsletter. I was too busy finishing up schoolwork.

The most text-heavy post was also post #47: ✅ Finally Done! 12/21/25, with approximately 194 words per image.

The most visually dense post was post #16: 🍴 When in (Insert City Name Here)... 5/18/25 because 72 images is a lot of images and is going to skew visual density.

I wanted to see the correlation between word count and image count, so I created a graph. I went in with the assumption that more words mean more pictures, and overall, the trend is statistically present. The trend line for the data was y = 0.0226x - 7.5732. This means that on average, my first image is after 379.34 words. Furthermore, the R² value is .4948, meaning that about 50% of the variation in the number of photos can be explained by the number of words in a post. In other words, about half of what determines photo count is based on the number of words, and the other half is due to factors I did not include (life, how many things I did, how many pictures I took in each event, how I was feeling when writing a particular newsletter, etc.). As we all know, in life, sh*t happens.

I can not say that these statistics are going to be the same going forward, but it was interesting taking a look at the metrics. Let me know if you want access to the data set to do your own analysis. I tried my best to analyze the data, but I would love to see anything interesting that you find.

Thank you for one year of What’s Up With Will!

I love David Foster Wallace. He is an incredible writer and thinker. I watched “This Is Water” a long time ago, and forgot about it. We had to listen to it for my methods class, and while it is a long watch, it is worth every single second.