When the door slammed with a click, I knew something was wrong. A few futile jiggles of the door handle confirmed my fear: I was locked in an unknown hotel stairwell in the middle of Europe.
After the panic subsided, I messaged my friend with a rescue plan. I would whistle the first movement of Mahler’s 1st Symphony, and he just needed to walk toward the sound. Sounds like a long shot, doesn’t it?
Five minutes later, I was free. Turns out my pastoral chirping permeated walls, doors and elevators to enable my escape.
That happened the summer before my freshman year of college. After arriving at NU, I’ve continued to whistle around campus — from Tchaikovsky symphonies to K-pop group Twice’s greatest hits. Whistling is fun. It’s expressive. With it, I can communicate with birds.
And funnily enough, it sets a guiding example for how I hope to report the news.
Just as my whistling cut through the hotel to help my friend find and free me, I want my stories and questions to pierce through the slop and noise of today’s media landscape — helping people locate the information they need.
That goal is still a work in progress, though I’ve hit the target a few times during college. During one town-gown meeting about rebuilding Ryan Field I covered for The Daily, my question about how the University would respond if Evanston didn’t approve of the project led to a walkout after NU officials refused to answer. In that case, I learned that even in the face of silence, the right questions can still tease out loud, striking answers.
I tried to keep the same principles in mind during my data reporting Journalism Residency Winter Quarter. A sidebar I wrote about H-1B visas in North Texas aimed to dispel misleading statistics about how many immigrant workers had actually been arriving in the region.
And I like to think that every so often, my whistling brings some whimsy to the people who happen to hear it (though admittedly, I know that’s not always the case). My journalism, I hope, does the same through intricate, sometimes surprising observation. Perhaps the chocolate-truffle hoarding rats I wrote about last summer brought readers some laughs.
The thought of being a real reporter with my own little cubicle and laptop and plastic ID badge is a little terrifying, if I’m being honest. Factor in all the aspects of being an adult that have crashed into me these last few months, like taxes, insurance and medical bills — I’m even more scared of the road ahead.
And yet, I remind myself, I’ve spent the last 14 years whistling my heart out wherever and whenever, with all the awkward eye contact and occasional compliments that come with it. What more should there be to fear about being perceived? Whistling and reporting are both forms of storytelling, and I hope to only get better and better at both.
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