CAMI KNIGHT: Last week, The Daily reported on Evanston City Council passing the city’s Strategic Housing Plan, Northwestern alumna Veronica Roth’s return to the “Divergent” universe and Pencil, a new online resource relieving students of the stress of creating their class schedules.
From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Cami Knight. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of the top headlines from the past week.
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CAMI KNIGHT: First, I sat down with Daily reporter Isabella Kunc and Assistant City Editor Tia Bethke to talk about Evanston’s new strategic housing plan, Housing4All. City Council passed the plan last Monday in a 7-2 vote.
Isabella and Tia, thank you so much for joining me today. Could you start by walking us through the goals of Evanston’s new strategic housing plan?
TIA BETHKE: It’s supposed to be an overview for zoning updates and future affordable housing programs. I think also with increasing affordability, increased housing is also increasing density, especially in neighborhoods that have historically been mostly single-family homes.
ISABELLA KUNC: I will say with that, there was a lot of councilmembers who still said they wanted to make sure that there was still single-family housing available, but yeah, there was, increasing density.
CAMI KNIGHT: And what did the development process look like for this housing plan?
ISABELLA KUNC: It started in the Housing and (Community) Development Committee, HCDC. It’s been in the works for a number of years. They tabled it for a little bit, and then came back to it in April, and then they tabled it again. They finally looked at it last Monday, and specifically this one obviously there were a lot of amendments between this one and the last one, but I don’t think they did that much work on it between March and April.
CAMI KNIGHT: I understand there was opposition to the plan at City Council. What is one of the major concerns that was aired, and how was it addressed at the meeting?
ISABELLA KUNC: There was a concern that it was too specific, especially for the parts that talked about zoning; it needed to be more broad to allow for different situations for different programs because, again, it is supposed to be this sort of overarching guiding document for future plans.
TIA BETHKE: A lot of the amendments had to do with trying to preserve single-family home neighborhoods and not increasing density there. There was also a just cause part of the plan that I believe one of the amendments struck out, and then they did end up striking that from the plan.
CAMI KNIGHT: How are Evanston residents feeling about the plan?
ISABELLA KUNC: I do feel like more people were definitely in favor of the general plan as a whole. What we definitely did see opposition was to some of the amendments, right? It was people either saying pass this now, get it over with, or people saying we want more amendments, like, come back to it, do more research into it. So, overall, people did want the plan, but they just had different ideas as to the specifics of what they wanted in it.
CAMI KNIGHT: Thank you so much, Tia and Isabella.
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CAMI KNIGHT: Next, I talked to Senior Staffer Sydney Gaw about the rise to fame and latest career moves of NU alumna Veronica Roth, who graduated from Weinberg in 2010.
Sydney, thanks for being here today.
SYDNEY GAW: Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me today.
CAMI KNIGHT: Tell me a little bit about Veronica Roth. Who is she?
SYDNEY GAW: Veronica Roth is an alum of the creative writing department here at Northwestern. I believe she graduated in 2010 and has since gone on to publish some really amazing books. She’s most well-known for her “Divergent” trilogy, which she actually wrote and published as a senior here at Northwestern. And, since then, she’s gone on to publish quite a few dystopian and fantasy books, but most recently, she just released her latest dystopian novel, which is also a romantic fantasy, and it’s titled “Seek the Traitor’s Son.”
CAMI KNIGHT: What is special to Roth about this latest novel, as compared to her other works?
SYDNEY GAW: In my conversations with Veronica, we really discussed the journey she went through in writing this book, and in addition to this particular story, going through many rounds of drafts. I believe the preliminary set of drafts were up to around 10 different versions of the story. And from that point, I mean, she still continued to edit and write a lot of it. So, from what she was telling me, this book kind of represented a new chapter in her writing journey. She was really focused on, you know, listening to what her emotions were telling her and what she wanted to write.
This book for her was a big step in kind of listening to her own thoughts and ideas about the writing process, and not necessarily feeling pressure from her audiences or from publishers to write a certain story.
CAMI KNIGHT: You wrote about Roth’s struggle to distance herself from the “Divergent” series for much of her career. Tell us more about what that means to her.
SYDNEY GAW: Yeah, so I mean, she really rose to fame quite rapidly back when she published the “Divergent” series. I mean, all of us here at NU who have kind of heard of that story know it to be this sort of, like, dream fantasy tale of one of our alums, because the process of her writing and publishing this book was just so quick, and, you know, even after the stories came out, her rise to fame was just as fast.
She was really thrust into this world of literary stardom. And from that point on, her work was always out there for people to judge and to criticize. And so I think she talks a lot about how in the years since the publication of the “Divergent” series, she’s really worked on coming to terms with her own writing and her own skill in getting confidence to write what she wants and not necessarily worry about or face the anxieties of these external pressures.
CAMI KNIGHT: How has Roth remained part of the Northwestern community following her graduation and rise to stardom as an author?
SYDNEY GAW: She’s visited a couple of times since graduating here, and from the instances that I’ve heard and that professors have shared, she’s been immensely generous with her time. (English) Prof. Brian Bouldrey, who was her thesis advisor here, mentioned that she had come, maybe about a decade ago, to participate in a panel on young adult literature here at Northwestern. And in this panel, which I believe was for a lot of creative writing students here, Prof. Bouldrey mentions that she was just so generous with answering questions from the audience and from other students, and she also displayed a genuine interest in each of those students.
CAMI KNIGHT: Sydney, thank you.
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CAMI KNIGHT: Finally, I talked to Copy Editor Sarah Park about a brand new tool NU students are using to assist with ongoing course registration and planning.
Sarah, thank you so much for joining me. Tell us, what is Pencil.nu?
SARAH PARK: Pencil.nu is a Chrome extension that connects to your CAESAR and gives students a way to look at CTECs and class analytics easier. So if you go into CAESAR and you’re using pencil.NU, you can see how the students rank it, how much they learned, how good the instruction was, plus CTECs, all in the same place.
CAMI KNIGHT: And how is pencil.nu different from other resources students use to plan their courses, like paper.nu and CAESAR?
SARAH PARK: It’s more that pencil.nu is a supplement to CTECs and paper.nu, because paper.nu and pencil.nu have different functions. So paper.nu allows you to schedule your classes in a more convenient way, but pencil.nu allows you to look at CTECs and class analytics in a more convenient way. And pencil.nu also connects to paper.nu, so for example, one of the new functions was the combination function, so in paper.nu you can put all four of your classes, or however many classes you’re taking, and press the combination function. And if your classes are taught by different teachers or in different times, it’ll give you different combinations of how your schedule could look like.
CAMI KNIGHT: Tell me about the brains behind this innovation. Who created pencil.nu and why?
SARAH PARK: I talked to the founder, Kevin Wang. He’s a McCormick junior, and he made this. He told me that he made this because last quarter, when he was doing registration for Winter Quarter, he thought the CTEC page was super unhelpful and that it wasn’t the fastest, and you had to open multiple different tabs to just get information for one class. And if you wanted to open, like, another class, then you would have to sign in again because you can’t open CAESAR on many different tabs, so he’s decided to fix this problem that he had.
I also talked to Jason Latz. He’s a contributor to pencil.nu. He got involved with pencil.nu a little later, but he’s also been helping code the program, and then also he’s been doing a lot of the marketing.
I asked them in my interview, I was like, “Oh, why do you do this for free?” And Kevin was like, “If I can fix a problem, why shouldn’t other people have the solution?”
CAMI KNIGHT: I know you talked to some students who are currently using pencil.nu to plan their courses for next fall. How are they feeling about this resource?
SARAH PARK: I mean, every person I’ve talked to, they gave me a lot of positive reactions. I think a lot of them talked about the combinations function, which I talked about earlier. I think it’s really helpful for people because all the information is in the same page rather than being on 10 different tabs on your computer.
CAMI KNIGHT: Thank you so much, Sarah.
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CAMI KNIGHT: Here are the other top headlines from the week:
Young Northwestern alumnus to make Broadway debut with ‘Death of a Salesman.’
Northwestern lacrosse gets revenge on Colorado in double-overtime thriller, advances to NCAA Semifinals.
And, Through the Blue Tint: Chicago’s Orange Line isn’t anything special, but it’s efficient.
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From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Cami Knight.
Thank you for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported and produced by Cami Knight.
The audio editor is Wallis Rogin. The multimedia managing editors are Ruby Dowling, Isabella Jacob and Matt Wasilewski. The editor-in-chief is Anavi Prakash.
