“I should write an article for Frankly Speaking!” This is what crosses my mind every time I see the newest edition populating the tables in the dining hall, and yet it’s somehow taken me a few months to get this article from concept to reality. Allow me to show you how to overcome the very same barriers I faced so you can have your very own article published right away in the September issue (my timing is rather poor, isn’t it?).

Now, don’t sit there with this paper in your hands and think to yourself that you have nothing to write about. Local newspapers are meant to build community by testing ideas, promoting healthy discourse, and ultimately helping us learn more about each other. It’s the perfect venue to respectfully share that passionate opinion of yours and engage the bright minds of your peers!

Ideating is as simple as picking out a particularly captivating hot take of yours (shout-out to Sammy and his thoughts on cheese), dropping your thoughts on the latest piece of media you spent some time with (shout-out to Ivy’s book reviews), or even sharing some of your personal experience in that class, project team, club, or off-campus activity you took a chance on.

We all have a lot to learn from each other, and a few more articles per Frankly Speaking issue might help drive student engagement. CORe elections might be more contested, there might be more 30-second videos, and maybe our hearts will even have room for a few more P&M surveys. Where does this engagement piece come from? Well, we noted in Local Democracy (a wonderful class!) that if a town has lively local journalism, it increases voter turnout in elections, reduces candidate bias, prevents polarization, and most certainly keeps people informed. These principles likely don’t fully translate to our cutesy little college, hence my ‘might’s and ‘maybe’s earlier, but the worst that could happen from an uptick in thoughtful Frankly Speaking articles is getting a few more ideas brewing in the mind of the dear reader.

What does this mean for ideating? Well, I’m not suggesting you pump out an article to support your campaign for CORe president, but if you recognize your influence and skip your monthly album review to advocate for having a formal at Olin every semester, it would not go amiss! Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that you should do some ideating for your next Frankly Speaking article. Stay with me now.

You may ask me how you might bring your idea to life in writing if it’s been a year or two since your last English class. After doing some research and analyzing some Frankly Speaking articles with a small set of Olin and Babson students (feel free to ask me for my process if you’re curious), I have five main recommendations for you:

• Do your research
• Write from personal experience
• Understand your audience and adjust accordingly
• Drop hook after hook until you’re certain your reader is fully committed
• Use persuasive frameworks such as ethos/pathos/logos or problem/solution/benefit to organize your thinking as needed

If you want to communicate an opinion or write something persuasive, you have to understand what you’re talking about. Usually, this means doing your research. Effective opinion or persuasive pieces often use a constructivist approach that builds on a set of facts or shared understanding to get to an argument and research helps make this possible. As a side effect, showing how your argument is connected to existing sources helps establish its credibility. Addressing any counterarguments that you found while researching is also important, as it gives the reader more control on what they can take away from your writing and allows for good faith interaction between an author and the reader. This is critical for any piece of local news that is meant to enrich a community.

However, sometimes even well-researched pieces with well-executed and logically sound claims fail to connect, potentially due to a lack of personal touch. This is where your lived experience becomes critical, as putting your voice into your writing helps meet your reader halfway and ensure they can relate to what you’re talking about. They are reading because they are interested in what you have to say, and you have to repay that interest ahead of time with personal stories, a strong sense of self, or anything else that affirms the humanity of everyone involved (I’m most certainly knocking AI here).

Integrating your research with your voice will only get you so far without considering your audience. Your credibility and relatability will falter if you don’t recognize that you are bound to your target audience in some capacity. For example, there’s plenty of Olin-specific language or culture such as acronyms, classes, or traditions to address or use as context in your writing so your argument can hit closer to home. Our shared understanding of our values, tensions, and lived experiences as Olin students is an additional basis from which to construct or support arguments designed to be read by each other.

Make sure to start off your writing strong! Even though I believe we should all be reading every article in Frankly Speaking, I also believe you should be ruthless and not give your reader a chance to look away from the page. Use engaging writing and a strong introduction to compel your reader to read the entire piece.

Lastly, there’s plenty of frameworks and tips out there to help with executing an argument. Notice how I didn’t say “create”. I scoured the internet for argument structures, and none of my peers thought them particularly necessary for delivering a strong opinion or persuasive piece. I agree with them that ethos, pathos, and logos, for example, is one version of a checkbox to use to see if your writing is organized and clear. So if you find yourself looking for a metric or two that can tell you how your writing is, I’d recommend you to print out your writing and close your computer. Go find a friend or peer and ask them to check up on your credibility and relatability, along with leaving you any other feedback they deem relevant. Hopefully they don’t leak your insightful argument to Carpe before your article is published. 

Okay, that’s all from me! Knowing that you’ve read all the way through, I’m filled with determination and I hope you are as well. I look forward to seeing your articles next semester :)

Cheers,

ELDN

1. https://democracyfund.org/idea/how-we-know-journalism-is-good-for-democracy/

All of us, from students to faculty, are highly opinionated at Olin. We have sets of beliefs we hold onto dearly, and as we like to claim, we are open to changing our opinions as long as we are presented with facts. I say “claim” because I’ve never seen a public discussion in Olin about any political issue. I know all of us are having these conversations in our friend groups, but why not in public? Because we are afraid to offend people.

Just this Sunday, I hosted a deliberative discussion on immigration for my Local Democracy class, and surprisingly, the most common reason people gave for not attending was not “I have finals,” but “I don’t want to get canceled.” During the discussion, I also realized that people I knew who had different opinions didn’t take the chance to share their viewpoints. It was the same reason: they didn’t want to offend anyone. 

How did we end up in this situation?

I truly believe that the blame is on all of us. Including me! We are all so politicized that whenever someone presents an opinion that conflicts with our belief system, we give a slight disgusted look to that person. I don’t mean this metaphorically. We are literally making a disgusted face, and I mean nearly all of us. And then comes the slow ritual of not talking to them, and not even saying hello when you pass by them. I saw this happen to myself, other people, and I’m 100% sure I gave this face to other people. We are acting like the idea they presented makes them, as a whole, rotten. Well, how do we stop this?

First of all, we’ve got to change our approach. We should stop respecting ideas and start respecting people. If we give this respect to ideas, then a “wrong” idea can lower the respect you give to the person. However, if everyone accepts that even the smartest or the most informed person can have stupid ideas (and we all have stupid ideas that don’t represent us as a person), then we can listen to that person with respect, regardless of the idea. The idea might not be “right,” but the respect we have for the person gives us the ability to discuss it. Otherwise, we will just ignore this person until the rest of our Olin lives, as we currently do.

Secondly, we need a structured environment where everyone can present ideas and represent them without the fear of “offending” or getting “canceled”. This transformation can’t happen in a single night, but this environment can help us train our acceptance muscle. Hopefully, one day, leading to an Olin where everyone can present their ideas without fear in a normal day-to-day discussion. 

There are definitely more ways we can improve the current environment, and I definitely believe the issue is much more complicated than I explained above. Maybe some of you think my rambling about this issue is offensive, or you might say that public discussions actually happen, but I don’t just see them. Regardless, please do not get offended by my ideas and reach out so we can discuss more. Until someone offers a better approach, I want to drop a survey link where you can show your interest in a possible club where we discuss political issues in regular intervals. I don’t know if  I can make this happen, as I’m planning to take 24 credits next semester, but I definitely can’t do this alone, and I’d appreciate it if people who are as passionate as I am would reach out: https://tinyurl.com/OlinDeserveBetter

Over my time at Olin, I have loved the honest, community-focused criticisms, praises, ideas, jokes, and everything else that Frankly Speaking has contained. I also enjoy writing and reflecting, and through my four years, I have made it a practice to use the Frankly format to write out my reflections specifically pertinent to Olin. My Google Drive is littered with documents named “Potential Frankly:…” followed by titles of almost a dozen half-finished thoughts. Some I wrote in one-night rages and never revisited, others were thoroughly edited and peer-reviewed only to not be submitted at the last moment. 

I knew I wanted to write one more Frankly Speaking, but I didn’t know what would be actually valuable to focus upon in this “last shot.” I considered revisiting my reflections on creating change at Olin, maybe one about our approach to community building and buy-in. Finally, I thought I was honing into writing about the many reflections I have on the tensions created by Olin’s apoliticalness. 

But in looking through all of my reflections, it became clear that only one was actually important: where the best spots on campus are to birdwatch.

Okay, so it obviously depends what you’re trying to see and when you’re trying to see it, but just gonna go over a generalist tour:

• Right out the gates, I’m going to lead with a hot take: the maintenance area right inside Parcel B by the soccer fields. You wouldn’t think it, but honestly, great-ass spot to see birds. Not only do you got the open area, a mix of coniferous and deciduous and dead and live trees, BUT you also are sat up on a bit of a hill so you get a better view of the whole tree.
• Going off this idea, a good climbing tree…Get up there and sit a bit! You’ll see so much cool stuff around ya! Best climbing tree in Parcel B is yours to find, but as a hint, if you walk in a straight line from East Hall to the pond, you’ll walk right by it.
• Shoot, I didn’t mean to put the cart before the horse here, ‘cause I know some of y’all don’t have a pair of binoculars/bird identification stuff. That’s a-okay! You can check out binoculars from the library (common Olin Library W), and Merlin Bird ID is a great free app for bird identification! If you don’t want all the hassle of identification, I respect though.
• The whole pond area is just the absolute best. Y’all, I have seen Solitary Sandpipers out there cozy-as-can-be once the native wildflowers grow up over the summer. Isn’t that crazy at Olin?? Also, it’s just great seeing the swallows there along with larger water birds like ducks and herons! 
• For rarer finds, deeper in the woods is always a good bet. There’s a roughly-beaten path back past the prairie and, for a special treat right now, there’s a pair of nesting Pileated Woodpeckers right along the path!
• Lastly, the marsh area you pass when driving in is just a classic. There are always Red Tailed Hawks hanging around and the Red Winged Blackbirds make for an amazing sunset experience!

Reach out to me if you got any questions, but otherwise, happy birding and happy time at Olin! Make sure to reflect on the important things. And write your own Franklys too—the more we share as a community, the more we understand each other and grow together, and most importantly, the more birds we see.

My total Olin bird count (as of 4/30): 65 unique species. (Absolutely ROOKIE numbers by the way, other past Olin students have cracked 100 on campus before. Could be you!)

So, you want to get the most out of college. That must mean taking as many classes as possible so that you don’t miss out on any content. Oh, and also be sure to join a project team, because you won’t have success finding a job if you don’t. Summer doesn’t mean a break from technical work; if you can’t get an internship, how are you ever going to be employed after graduation?

I was recently talking to my fellow seniors about what they wish they knew during our first year at Olin. The response that inspired me to write this article was “I wish I was aware of any seniors who weren’t dedicating their life to project teams and who were only taking 12-16 credits per semester finding good jobs after graduation.” I heard that and immediately thought, “Hey, that’s me. I’m a senior with a relatively empty calendar who found a good job in her field.” So now I’m here to tell you my experience and how I got the most out of college (as an E:C).

This right here is my simple advice for happiness: focus your energy on things you enjoy. If you are ever putting time and effort into a class or club and feel that you aren’t getting enough out of it, just stop. You don’t need to get an A in every class or be the most productive member of a project team if you aren’t enjoying it. Instead, choose 2-3 projects/courses/activities that you are most interested in and spend your time delving into those subjects. Next, commit to 1-2 other activities, and complete the minimum amount of work expected from you. This does not mean completely slacking off, but it means becoming less attached to producing quality work and more attached to your general well-being and happiness. If you are on a team, be sure to communicate the amount of time and effort you are able to contribute.

Pro tip: you can take 12 total Olin credits as pass/no credit throughout all your semesters. These can only be applied to courses that aren’t being used for major requirements. However, if there is a non-required elective that you feel is taking up too much of your time, you can apply for pass/no credit, which will remove the stress of maintaining your GPA, if that’s something that’s important to you.

Finally, I want to talk about my experiences with internships. Mainly, the fact that I never did one (although I did do a summer of research at Olin). Internships are important for gaining professional experience and connections, and I recommend pursuing at least one throughout your time at Olin. However, it is not the end of your prospects if you do not manage to get one. They create connections and improve your resume, but are not necessary to get a job after college. Again, I never got an internship, and I feel that it didn’t negatively impact my job search.

*Insert conclusion here* Moral of the story: Marie Kondo your iCal and keep only the commitments that spark joy.