Profiles
I started writing these at the end of my sophomore year and they’ve become my favorite type of writing. They have provided a lot of opportunities for me to expand my interviewing skills as well as writing to tell a person’s story rather than to just provide information.
Carrying core values
Despite its smaller word count, this story is one of the most challenging ones I’ve written. I had to figure out how to condense not only a 45-minute interview but also multiple class periods of observation on a JROTC instructor at my school into 300 words. Before asking for edits, I put myself through multiple drafts on this piece, experimenting with different metaphors before eventually landing on using the U.S. Army’s core values as the guiding path to tell Clark’s story.
An open book
The wording of this story was everything for me and something I spent an incredibly large amount of time on. After my 40-minute interview with the coach, I struggled with how to tell her story, a large part of which involved her ongoing battle with cancer, through a lens that encapsulated who she was both as a person and a teacher. After having multiple staffers and my adviser read drafts with different metaphors of the same story, I was able to figure out which direction, the one that compelled her honesty and openness, was the most compelling and write through that lens.
Fostering futures
Writing this story about a local nonprofit for those aging out of foster care was a several-month long process. It initially started out as a group project: we worked together to do interviews and write the final draft. However, the next semester, I was asked to take the redraft of the story on, which required several follow-up interviews, which resulted in me starting from scratch. Originally, we had made the focus of the story be on the organization itself, but after I did more interviews with the founder and those that had worked with her, I realized that she had a much more compelling story than just the organization. This story isn’t yet published, but will be soon.