On June 23, cherubs saw an assignment was due that evening on their first week schedule.
The assignment turned out to be a way for cherubs to meet a first friend. Prof. Roger Boye announced the assignment was for each cherub to write a news feature story about their roommate. Cherubs were given about an hour and a half to interview their roommate and write their story.
Roommates Max Averbach of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Benjamin Fogler of Needham, Massachusetts, arrived at the program at different times throughout the day, so they didn’t connect much before interviewing each other.
“It was a great way to get to know your roommate and just get more familiar with someone that you’re going to be spending several hours with every day,” Averbach said.
Averbach said he learned that Fogler was interested in comedy, and Fogler said he mainly learned about how Averbach got into journalism. When the story was first assigned, Fogler thought the time allotted for the story felt like a short amount of time.
“It was disguised as very fast paced,” Fogler said. “I thought it was gonna be a lot more intensive, and I realized it was just like a get to know you activity. It was actually really fun.”
Like Averbach and Fogler, William Karr of Wilmette, Illinois, said he didn’t speak much with his roommate, Jack Spector of Washington, D.C., before his interview with him.
“It’s a good opportunity to just sit down and get a chance to talk to them,” Karr said. “I didn’t really have time to talk to him before the feature, so it was just good to get the chance to sit down and get general knowledge of each other because you are going to be sharing a room for four weeks.”
