{"id":8118,"date":"2025-07-22T21:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T21:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/?p=8118"},"modified":"2025-07-22T21:17:56","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T02:17:56","slug":"molly-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/07\/molly-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Molly, Molly, Molly and Molly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">At 17, I had never met another Molly. But when I walked into Jones Hall and opened a thick welcome packet, I flipped to the room assignments section and on floor two found Molly Chodos of Morganville, New Jersey; Molly Connelly of Lafayette, California; and Molly Kurtzer-Ellenbogen of Washington, D.C. I finally found myself, Molly Kaplan, a native of San Jose, California, on floor three.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Other name pairs, like the Mayas and the Logans, lived together. Not the Mollys. I confirmed the reason with head instructor Dr. Mary Lou Song: \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to torture you guys.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It\u2019s confusing enough with four Mollys, let alone putting two Molly C\u2019s and two Molly K\u2019s in the same dorm room.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">With 90 cherubs, I assumed there would be at least some name twins. But a quartet?! And with a name that ranked 75th on the \u201cmost popular baby names\u201d for girls when we were born?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">For the next four weeks, every shout of \u201cMolly\u201d ended with four head turns, no matter who it was intended for, and every introduction started with an explanation of which one we were.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our five W\u2019s: the what (a shared passion for journalism), the why (ask our parents), the where (Medill), the when (July 2025) and of course, the who (the Mollys!).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some cherubs have a name twin, or two, but the 2025 cherub class contains four with the same moniker. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":232,"featured_media":9419,"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":[423],"class_list":["post-8118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experiences"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":423,"user_id":232,"is_guest":0,"slug":"mollykaplan","display_name":"Molly Kaplan","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/57eccf9b9c6d3dbf1c04ef82541b5baea6d850768e991d80637587f7e2c9ead1?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"Kaplan","first_name":"Molly","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8118","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\/232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8118"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10077,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8118\/revisions\/10077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8118"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=8118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}