{"id":7694,"date":"2025-07-22T20:53:04","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T20:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/?p=7694"},"modified":"2026-01-18T23:14:57","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T04:14:57","slug":"interviewing-cherubs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/07\/interviewing-cherubs\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to ask, listen and try again"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the third week of Cherubs, Abby Stone of Concord, Massachusetts sent nearly 50 emails and DMs for a single story. She got six replies.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt really forced me to dig and find more sources,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For many Cherubs, that was lesson one on interviews: rejection is part of the job. Other lessons came from a lecture on advanced interviewing with instructors Bret Begun and Cynthia Wang.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBeware of sexy people!\u201d Wang said of preparing to interact with strong personalities. \u201cDon\u2019t get distracted. Sweat the details.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That, she said, means showing up with spare pens, pre-written questions and knowing what you must walk away with. Sometimes, it means texting a source five times.<\/span><\/p>\n

While some Cherubs used these skills to land interviews through DMs or LinkedIn, others happened in person.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like I was ambushing people,\u201d said Matilda Haney Foulds, of Mountain View, California, who recalled her nerves before her first street interview. \u201cBut once you do it, it\u2019s like jumping into a cold pool.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That cold plunge led to a feature story from a Fourth of July conversation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI only asked four questions,\u201d Foulds said. \u201cThe rest was just them telling me their story.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Irene Park, of Fullerton, California, said she learned to be brave when it came to asking people for an interview.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe worst thing they can say is no, or not even that,\u201d Park said. \u201cBut in the long run, you don\u2019t know until you try.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In interviews, Cherubs learned to prepare, persist and ask better questions, even in grocery stores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":223,"featured_media":7922,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[419],"class_list":["post-7694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":419,"user_id":223,"is_guest":0,"slug":"janehahn","display_name":"Jane Hahn","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d904b5b31964eac28408b2683f874bbb19dad222662f15315a61992e839ab143?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"Hahn","first_name":"Jane","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/223"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7694"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8849,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694\/revisions\/8849"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7694"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=7694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}