{"id":7715,"date":"2025-07-22T21:02:44","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T21:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/?p=7715"},"modified":"2025-07-22T20:32:42","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T01:32:42","slug":"montana-meets-medill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/07\/montana-meets-medill\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana meets Medill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since before the turn of the century, only two cherubs from Montana have attended the Medill-Northwestern Journalism Institute. I am one of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I verified this fact by looking through Program Director Roger Boye\u2019s vintage paper records. It didn\u2019t surprise me. Montanans like to keep to ourselves, so it adds up that very few would venture out from our picturesque mountain villages and plains farming towns to the busy streets of Evanston.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I arrived at the Medill Cherubs program, I noticed my cherub peers held misconceptions about my home state.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cI thought [Montana] was really just wilderness, and not a lot of people,\u201d said Molly Chodos of Marlboro, New Jersey. \u201cEveryone wearing camouflage and talking about the deer they caught today.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like Chodos, many of my fellow cherubs were unable to place Montana on a map. (Yes, I held up a blank map on my iPhone and forced them to point to it.) As the first Montanan they\u2019d ever met, I was able to educate them on what makes my state so special: its unique culture, connection with the outdoors and\u00a0 \u201cCanadian accents,\u201d as Chodos put it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In exchange, they exposed me to parts of their cultures. We laughed at varying pronunciations of words (Montanan \u201cmilk\u201d vs. Floridian \u201cmelk\u201d), united over shared favorite sports teams (go Packers) and introduced each other to new traditions (apparently there is a whole second half to \u2018Happy Birthday\u2019 that just involves counting).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The lessons I learned from the other cherubs, who are just as passionate about reporting as I am, will stick with me for life \u2013 in Montana or wherever journalism takes me.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The exchanges I had with fellow cherubs exposed me to cultures, knowledge and opportunities I can\u2019t find back home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":225,"featured_media":8375,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[464],"class_list":["post-7715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experiences"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":464,"user_id":225,"is_guest":0,"slug":"williamhansen","display_name":"William Hansen","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/794f804c73fbaff37deae8bc22cdf493987d7e6c0264382a923eff8a9dc518a4?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"Hansen","first_name":"William","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715","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\/225"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7715"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9860,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions\/9860"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7715"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=7715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}