Northwestern: Background and community (required)

My father runs a one-man print shop in a strip mall, and after school I am his unpaid front desk. People come in needing funeral programs, quinceanera invitations, a flyer for a missing cat. My job is to ask the questions my father, whose English still bends at the edges, finds awkward to ask: What feeling do you want? Who is this for? I learned that a funeral program and a birthday banner are the same problem wearing different clothes. Both are someone handing you their need and trusting you not to flatten it.¹Translating between my father and his customers made me a kind of professional listener. I cannot design a thing until I understand who it is really for, and that habit followed me out of the shop. It is why I joined the debate team, the school paper, and a volunteer tax-prep clinic that sounds nothing like the others but is exactly the same: people arrive confused and a little scared, and someone has to translate the system back to them in their own language.²I want to bring that translator's instinct to Northwestern. Medill's residency program, where students report from a real city desk, is the print shop scaled up: strangers with a need, a deadline, and a writer who has to get them right. ³I am drawn to the quarter system too, because it means I can try a public-policy class and a documentary-production class in a single year, the way I move between funeral and birthday in a single afternoon. In the dorm, I expect I will be the person who reads your cover letter at midnight and asks who it is really for. At the print shop I am the bridge between what someone feels and what they can say. ⁴I would like to keep being that bridge in Evanston, except this time the people crossing it will be classmates, and the thing we are building together will be much bigger than a flyer.