Stamina. Quicker fingers. Thirty extra seconds. All things students would have traded a rib for during the first few days of the Medill cherub program.
There’s a reason notepads and laptops didn’t make that list. Up-and-coming journalists found out they had to learn to work in chaos. There’s no better time to learn that than the start.
“At the beginning, it’s teaching the importance of deadlines,” community and academic associate Ben Shapiro said. “As you get through the program, deadlines space out. It works really well because you start off with a bang and it’s all uphill from there.”
Cherubs typed frantic notes and listened desperately to intertwined fast-paced narratives for hours. Deadlines were set 40, 30, then 20 minutes after each starting point, and herds of panicky adolescents surged up into the hallways to write.
It initially sounded like hell, especially to the nervous and unacclimatized. It was far from that to Logan Szymanski from Edwardsville, Illinois.
His friend had gone to a different summer program and was complaining about how the environment wasn’t rigorous enough. Szymanski was “worried it would be the same,” and was pleasantly surprised.
“We come here, and we’re immediately on that grind,” he said.
That grind is more than just typing away. It’s about finding the dedication to journalism, and cherubs pulled out the gusto to report for their lives.
“It was originally a bit overwhelming,” said David Singer from Rye, New York. “But getting more exposed to it has made it more enjoyable.”
