Sarah Robertson's Senior Project Blog

  This week, I continued drafting and editing my article, which I’ll mostly spare you all the pretty mundane details of (I wrote a research section and three profiles. Then, I rewrote them. Whoo.) I’ll hear back from Suzanne soon for feedback that will inform my direction for writing and editing next week. Image: Me writing ft Catie Macauley doing a thumbs up and also writing.  One challenge this week has been keeping sustained focus on writing. It was much easier last week and the week before when I was researching and conducting interviews because it felt more engaging and novel, whereas while I love writing, I’ve done A LOT of it throughout the past four years of my Catlin Gabel career, and it’s harder to be excited about right now.  I’m also finding that the style of writing feels less entertaining, because I’m trying to directly and impersonally share information as opposed to creating characters and narratives that require extensive description or arguing through an...

  This week, I sat in front of my computer a lot. I conducted four zoom interviews—three with students, one with Dan Petrocelli, our school counselor—and then used free trials on transcription services otter.ai and temi to get written copies.  Image: Me editing a transcript, ft. my little sister making pancakes.  In these interviews, I didn’t get a consistent narrative about the effect the pandemic has had on each student’s life, which I anticipated to some degree. However, it did pose a challenge in developing the focus of my article. I met with Suzanne to discuss possible directions, and we created an outline (during which I learned some fancy new journalism vocabulary. Reporting “north star”= stated focus of your article. Nut graf= a paragraph explaining the context of your article).  I began drafting the article late this week. The hook is about coming-of-age moments. For teens in 2020, our coming-of-age moment was a pandemic. I follow this with a more fact-based...

Hi everyone! For the next three weeks, I’m working on writing an article about how the pandemic and subsequent economic fallout is affecting teenager’s career and life goals. I know that the pandemic and social distancing have changed the way I think about my own future—for example, I measure my sense of success much differently and am a lot less preoccupied with metrics like test scores or even future career advances, marriage, or building a nuclear family than before March 2020. I’m interested in learning whether other people in my age group have had similar experiences if there are traceable trends, and what exactly was the catalyst, if any, for these changes.  In order to answer these questions, I have the support of Suzanne Stevens, editor of the Portland Business Journal. I have weekly meetings with her to learn more about the journalistic process and what my next steps should look like to write my article. I met Suzanne because she has a daughter on my younger sister’s socce...