Chris Petersen: Alright, one year later here we are. It's May 21st, 2015, we are with Jodie Davaz, and this is the second interview we've done with you. We did one almost exactly a year ago, May 27th, 2014.

Jodie Davaz: It's hard to believe it's been a year.

CP: Yeah. So, it's been an interesting and exciting and probably busy year for you, and what we'll want to talk about, talk about that. So, when we spoke to you it was late spring, heading into summer of 2014 and you had hatched an idea for a successor to the yearbook, an idea that had been accepted and you were going to go for it. And so, when I talked to you last, it didn't even have its official name yet, so now Beaver's Digest; you've got two issues under your belt, another one on the way. So, I'm interested in us starting out by you telling me essentially how we got from where we were at that time to moving through the summer and getting towards actually starting to create that first issue.

JD: Well yeah, I was pitching the idea of what's now Beaver's Digest to a bunch of people, letting them know that "this is a thing that you should be a part of, you should get your students involved with it, just in terms of letting me know what kinds of stories are out there on the OSU campus that we can come and visit." At one of those meetings I got a follow-up email afterwards. I was calling it Beaver Mag at the time and they said "we Googled Beaver Mag and came up with some unsavory results." And I was like "oh no, sensitivity issues," so I put it out there, basically I made a Facebook page called OSU Student Life Magazine and I got all of my friends to like it and share it and everything and I put out like a Google form request saying "name our new magazine." I got a bunch of submissions and then I took it to the Orange meeting at work. At that time it was still student media, which we named Network as a new thing. So, I took it to the professional staff and all the student leaders of all the mediums and got their—I mean, I eliminated some that I just didn't like. I just, off the bat. But then I put it to a vote with everyone else and everybody decided on Beaver's Digest being the best. The second favorite was Beaver Byte, B-Y-T-E, but we thought that read a little too techie. So, Beaver's Digest.

And it's funny, because when we revealed the name, the person who submitted the name anonymously—they were all anonymous submissions—came forward and it's a KBVR-FM DJ who ended up naming it. And so, he has this kind of strong investment in the magazine now, because he named it, and I think that's really sweet.

So, I came into it, I mean I did three years in radio and I kind of dabbled in other things. I've been published in the Barometer a few times because I'm, before anything, I'm a writer. But I had no idea how to make a magazine. I had no idea of the challenges that were going to come before me, and I was just like well, let's do something. So, they were able to kind of break the norm and actually pay me over the summer to do my job, which is nice, and I used that time to really learn how to use Adobe Creative Suite, InDesign and Photoshop and Illustrator. And I also used that time to get messages out on listservs for digital communication arts and writing and photography and art and English, mostly, and honors, because honors kids just leap into things.

And I got a good response. I had probably, before the end of the summer, kind of a dozen people who were interested in working with me. And we got them together and we kind of noodled out like what was our goal, what did we hope to do. I know I have some skills, not great skills, but some, and I can teach you all how to write and you can teach me how to photograph. And we just sort of kept adding on people who were interested and built up a team. The biggest flux of new people I think came at the Student Media open house, which is at the beginning of every term Student Media opens its doors and we all have a little display and people, primarily in an MC409 practicum, come in and see what kind of opportunities are available. So, every digital communication arts student pretty much, with some exceptions, needs to do about ninety hours of service with Orange Media Network.

And so, I gave this big like—because radio can have people listen to the radio station, TV can be like "here's Locals Live, here's Prism, here's the Barometer," but I didn't have anything to show people, so I was like "my name's Jodie, I'm starting Beaver's Digest and we don't exist yet, and I need your help. And if you want to have a say and have a legacy at OSU, here's how you can do it." And that was a real idealistic pitch. And people bought it and it was great and I got this fantastic team, the blind leading the blind, and this is what we made [holds up a copy of Beaver's Digest].

[0:05:30]

We made the first issue of Beaver's Digest, cover done by Halie Sutton, who's going to be taking over after I graduate. She began working with Beaver's Digest not knowing that it would help her with practicum; she just got the email on the listserv and was like "yeah, I want to do this." Hooked her up with a bunch of football passes, press passes, and she shot the cover. And it's a forty-page magazine filled with a bunch of stories about OSU life. We've got profiles on the Godby brothers, who ran around Oregon promoting College of Public Health, and Fish and Wildlife Club and Cooking Club and the Red Dress Fashion Show, all kinds of stuff that happened in fall term. So, it's not a yearbook, because it's got more words than a yearbook, it's got fewer pictures than the yearbook, but it still kind of preserves memories of OSU. So, you can put three of these together, we'll get our third issue out, you can put three of these together and it'll still hopefully hold a slice of every student, somewhere on the pages, I hope. That's the goal.

So yeah, that's sort of—we got this one out, we were super proud of it, very jazzed, and then we were like "wait, we have another whole one to do, this is not over." We put this one out at the end of winter. And this one is all about celebrating the Student Experience Center, which opened to the world last term and beginning of this term. I love this picture, because in all of the architect's artist renderings of the building, this is kind of the angle from which they approached it, and this is really a photo showing of how that actually turned out. I don't know, I could talk for years on the significance of every photo and every word, but—because you know I'm a proud mommy, pretty much. So, I don't know if that covers what you wanted me to.

CP: Yeah. Well, let's talk a little about some specifics here. So, this, these are volunteers for the most part, correct? Your staff.

JD: Yeah. I started as the only paid staff and then I wiggled around some budget and I was able to hire two more people. The first was Maranda McArthur, who is our public relations director, and she's fantastic. And again, she's been with us since the beginning, always going above and beyond, doing more than her practicum class required of her. She's stellar, and ended up getting hired by Prism also, as a PR director. So, she kind of almost doubled her hours that way, just because Prism saw what she was doing with me and wanted some, wanted in on it. And then our graphic design director, Halie Sutton, who I said will be the editor-in-chief next year. And I adore her, I think she's fantastic. She, just as a media major—and rather than a writing minor like I am, she's a photo minor—and so she has a visual eye that I don't, and so she's been able to help me learn and help an entire staff learn how to make this thing pretty.

And so, I was able to hire them at the end of fall term. So, if you look at the fall issues, you'll see that it looks good, it's fine, and that was under my design direction, and then you look at the winter issue and it looks so much better, just like wow, super good, and that's because of her. And the spring issue, of course, now that we both have even more time and experience under our belts and our team of volunteers has grown, it's going to be yet prettier. And hopefully as she's editor she not only grows it design-wise but also editorial-wise, in a way that I couldn't.

For example, we played it really safe this year, we talked about cultural centers and fashion shows and things that really were happy OSU, hunky-dory things. OSU isn't always happy, hunky-dory. We haven't discussed tuition and displeasure with book prices or anything like that. We capture the happy parts of OSU, but that's not the entire OSU experience. And I felt that I had to capture the happy OSU because we have a lot of support from OSU now, we have a lot of buy-in from clubs and organizations and the administration. And so, if next year we do something slightly edgier or slightly less happy, people already know that we come from a good place. So, if I had another year I would change it in a few ways, and I think that she will do a fantastic job.

[0:10:22]

CP: So, the mission of this publication is clearly different from the yearbook, what the yearbook was, although it's succeeding the yearbook in trying to fill that niche on some level. There's a different sort of things going on, I guess.

JD: Yeah, I mean—see, the problem is, and the problem I've been running my head against all year is I never worked with yearbook. I had no idea what the mission of the yearbook is. All I have from yearbook is flipping through the pages and seeing some good, some bad, some really good, some really bad, and trying to figure out like okay, absorb all this information I saw. A lot of photos, little photos, whereas in this we have a couple big photos, not a whole lot of articles, other than like "this club does this," not so much "this club held this event and this is what it was like." So yeah, I guess the mission for both would be to feature these students and clubs and activities, but the mission of Beaver's Digest is to also tell what went down.

CP: So, it's taking on more of a journalistic angle to it.

JD: Yeah. Yeah, but we also differ from the Barometer in that Barometer writes very strict-like journalism; AP, inverted triangle style. You pick up a newspaper, you pick up the Barometer, they do the same thing. Ours, I instruct my writers "write like you're telling your best friend about this cool thing you went to, and you also just had a can of Red Bull." And so, "write with energy and pizazz and put your voice and your personality into it." Sometimes that comes across, sometimes it doesn't, but we tend to add on a slightly more creative writing element to it that boy, if my writers ever try to write for a newspaper with our style, they're going to get in trouble. But for their own personal writing projects, I think that's a good thing to learn.

Also with Beaver's Digest, for our volunteers, the difference between Beaver's Digest and Barometer is Beaver's Digest has a more multimedia approach, so everyone learns how to be a photographer and people also take videos and learn how to interact with social media, whereas with Barometer everything's so deadline-based that their volunteers—well, they don't have any volunteers, they have a paid staff that's bigger than mine, which is good, there's incentive to write things quickly, but they have to turn things in like day-of and they don't have a whole lot of chance to develop other multimedia skills. Some of them are fantastic at that anyway; they've just taken their own time to learn it, but that's not the main goal for every beat reporter there, to my knowledge.

You'll have to talk to people around the Barometer to really—but people from Beaver's Digest have come into Beaver's Digest and they've learned "I like to write" or "I like to take videos" and then moved on to working for the Barometer or working for KVBR TV, because they were able to spend the time the whole term developing a product and developing their skills to the point where they can do things more quickly with other mediums. So, I also kind of think of Beaver's Digest as the training ground. And I like that. I mean, part one we try to serve the OSU community by telling their stories and presenting a good product, but also my second duty is to help media students and non-media students come in and learn a bunch of skills that they can use in a practical way out in the real world, or in the professional world, I guess. And honestly, I'd rather churn out thirty good students rather than five thousand good magazines. And usually one follows the other.

CP: So, you spent the summer basically building your own skills and developing some infrastructure. Once fall term came around, did you try to map out some ideas for stories you wanted to gather, or did this just evolve over the course of the term more organically?

JD: A little of both for fall term; for winter it was different, but I figured how many stories do I need to fill a forty-page magazine, and who is interested on campus, and I wrote that all on a list and then I contacted all the people on the list and said "what are you doing this term?" and then just went to cover those events. So, a little planning, a little organic. Winter term and spring term now have been progressively more organic as people have been picking up Beaver's Digest and being like "I want to be in this," which is like the best feeling ever when I get an email and they're like "Beaver's Digest is cool, can my club be in it?" and less and less "how do I get my picture in the yearbook?" because I got a lot of those. Oops.

[0:15:13]

There have been actually a couple of parents who were, like one in particular, "my daughter's a fifth-generation Beaver and for every generation Beaver we've gotten all four yearbooks for their class, and now my daughter is in her senior year and she can't get a yearbook." I'm like [exhales sharply] "I'm sorry, your daughter should have gone for editor of the yearbook." I mean, I don't say that, but I'm feeling like "I'm doing my best, lady, come on." I forget where I was going with that—oh, the process.

CP: Yeah, the process by which you were selecting stories to cover or write up.

JD: Yeah, I mean it's changed so much over the year. So yeah, fall term I came up with a list and I contacted people and I was like "this is what we are, this is what we're doing" and kind of had to shove our way into the process and had to do a lot of planning or else we weren't going to get enough content. And in fact, there were sometimes when we didn't get enough content and we ran stories that we didn't want to run because, like the photos didn't turn out. We had to run those stories anyway. Winter, it wasn't so much of an issue. We had a lot of leftovers from fall term that like "we want to do a story with you but you didn't have any events this term, so let's work with you next term," and then more people emailing us and then finally this term we had an overabundance of stories, not only because we've been contacting people; we've barely contacted anyone, but because hangovers from winter term like "oh, let's get in touch with you in the spring" and then also people contacting us and saying "let's work together."

And so yeah, we'll say "your event sounds interesting, when is it?" We'll send a writer and photographer, get them out, get them back in, get the photos and the writing in, edit them, we do group critiques of each other's writing and photography, so a couple of editorial meetings every week where we sit down and we read through the story and then we give each other comments like "this was great, this was not so great, let's make the lead more spicy and interesting, let's use a different word for this, this could be read as offensive, this is super good visual," like imagery, line, "this photo illustrates the point that the story was trying to make more than this photo, so we'll recommend the designers use the first photo." And in that way, I think, I mean I've definitely become a better writer reading everyone else's writing and critiquing it and giving it both criticism and applause. And other people, I've noticed their writing get better too. I mean, that's encouraging, I love that.

Right, so we get the proofread stuff, we get it fact-checked. Another difference between myself and the Barometer is I send a club or group their story before it gets published. That's not typical for newspapers ever. But I have that kind of lenience, and I want to represent everyone accurately, and this year's all about making friends. People can make enemies next year, you know [laughter], once we've become established. And people appreciate that and they've caught a lot of factual errors, and we, I think have made better product because of it, but that's very atypical.

Okay, so then we do the fact check, we send the completed, revised, fact-checked copy and the edited beautiful photos over to the design team and they make a layout. At the end of the term we all get together and decide what layout's going where, how we're going to arrange everything, then we build the editor's note, table of contents, contributors' page, and then it's done.

CP: Where is it printed?

JD: It is printed with Oregon Web Press in Albany.

CP: Is there a faculty advisor?

JD: Yes, our main faculty advisor is Don Boucher, he's the creative services coordinator at OMN. Secondarily, we work with Steven Sandberg, he's the journalism coordinator at OMN. We ended up working with Don more. I think Steven's mostly working with Barometer and Beaver News, the TV show. And Don's mostly working with Barometer's ad team kind of, and us, and Prism, our lit magazine, sometimes.

CP: What role have the advisors played in kind of day to day operations?

JD: They mostly let us go. They just say "you do your thing and check in with us if you need anything," and so sometimes Don will come to our design meetings and give his opinion on layout designs or graphic designs and say "I think that this color might not read very well when it's printed," which is great, he knows about the difference between on-screen design and what actually will come out of the printer. But I mean, we'll turn over the magazine to him toward the end of the term and be like "what do you think?" and he'll be like "not bad." And Steven also comes into play toward the end of the term when we're putting the magazine together; we'll send stories over to him and he'll be like "you typoed here" or "I would change this stylistically" or "AP would recommend that you use this" whatever. But through most of the creative process it's just us with each other.

CP: Something that occurs to me listening to you is that the buy-in to this, it seems like it took off pretty quickly amongst the student body, and that would seem to belie this idea that your generation lives their lives completely online and would be disinterested in a print publication like this.

JD: Yeah, what's going on? I think there's a little bit of romance with getting your name and your photos in print. I think that students also recognize that employers may not live their lives online and would value having a line on a resume that says "I was published in a magazine." So, even if we're not particularly interested in the printed, our future employers might be interested in that. But other than that, I mean yeah, Beaver's Digest could have been an entirely online magazine. People would have read it, probably, and people would have been proud to be printed there, but there's something nice about being like "hey Mom" [holds Beaver's Digest out], "I'm on the front page."

CP: Yeah. There is a kind of a digital component to what you've done though, is that correct?

JD: Yeah, so we are on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, we have brief stints on Pinterest and Tumblr, but we don't keep those updated very much. Basically the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram update daily with information about the stories we're doing. For example the Native American Longhouse had a salmon bake last Friday, and so we previewed it on Thursday, saying "hey, make sure you go to the salmon bake; free salmon, delicious, learn about culture, super." Then that Saturday we followed up with one of the photos we took and said "here's a quote that we got"—I mean, we didn't phrase it like "here's a quote," but "the salmon bake was super cool, we learned that the alder wood was sourced from the same area where the fish was sourced from and learned about these traditions." And so, we don't just post up a picture, but we also give a little context behind the picture and make it a learning moment.

We also, at the end of the term, publish our magazines, just in PDF form on a website called ISSUU; issuu.com, I think. Yeah. And you can look up Beaver's Digest and it's there, and you can click through, which is nice for folks who want to show the magazine to their family not nearby and they don't want to mail the magazine out. So, that's pretty cool.

CP: So, the model that's been established with the print publication and kind of an ancillary digital presence, is that—do you think that's how the magazine's going to go forward, or are there different ideas for how that might evolve?

JD: I think you'd have to ask Halie.

CP: Yeah.

JD: I would encourage her to definitely keep the social media digital presence going, because we only come out once a term. It's really important to keep our name out and about in the world, aside from week one when we're distributing, so people know that Beaver's Digest exists during week five because we're posting about interesting things. So, I would hope that she keeps digital going, if the print version had to be scrapped, and in return for the, what is it, like two thousand, five hundred or something every term that we pay to get the magazine printed. If she could do something better with that print money—I mean we're in a contract with Oregon Web Press for three years, so it wouldn't be Halie or the person after her, but the person after that. So what is that, 2017? I don't know, who cares. That person, if that person decides to scrap the print thing and go totally digital and be able to use that money to pay a staff of reporters and get really high-quality work because they have that pay incentive, I wouldn't blame that person.

I don't have that much investment in Beaver's Digest after I graduate, or else I would be a very sad person. I hope that the people who take it on after me are excited about it and passionate about it like I am, but whatever they do to it; they could add ads, like we are currently ad-free, which is amazing, but if they add ads for some reason, like "you go, you do you." But yeah, digital, it could be that yeah, they scrap the print version, go all-digital and then have a cool not just a PDF, but you can click on the photo that's in the digital version and then a video pops up and you see all the stuff and it becomes sort of a multimedia web experience. There are a lot of really cool things that could happen that in its first year are just impossible to create. But I mean, wherever it goes, I look forward to seeing it.

CP: So, now that we are closing out on the third issue, has the reality of this project kind of matched your initial vision, or have there been substantial differences between those two?

[0:25:37]

JD: Lots and lots of differences. I think if you listen to my interview from last year, you'll hear me talking about how it's more of a collaborative project for the entire university, so reaching out to—we keep using the Longhouse as an example—reaching out to the other students who were involved in it and getting their tweets and getting their cellphone pictures and getting documents and photos from the Longhouse and including that in the magazine. That was sort of the initial vision, making it not just Beaver's Digest staff, but everyone. We tried doing that fall term and there wasn't a whole lot of buy-in from the general student population, I think because nobody knew who we were. So, we could message somebody and be like "can we use your tweet?" and they'd be like "what? Why?"

So, if we want to make Beaver's Digest more of a community project than an OMN project, we would probably have to start doing that next year, just because now people know who we are and they would be willing to send us their content. I'd still like to see that happen someday. I'd also like to see there being more pages so we could give salmon bake four pages instead of one or two, so that we can include all of that content. But as of right now, it's going to be like a picture or two and whatever the writer wrote, and we don't have a lot of space for tweets.

CP: What do you feel like you've learned about kind of the culture, the student culture here at OSU over the course of this year, going so deeply into it from this publication? Kind of a big question.

JD: I wrote something in the editor's note about this. It wasn't this one, it was the other one. I'll read this to you, because this answers your question.

CP: Alright.

JD: It's kind of long, so I'll just read you the relevant part. "There's a consistency to our curiosity, calling us to turn one more page in a textbook or explore one more corner of an ever-interesting world around us. There's a constancy to our friendships, keeping us close through life's thrills and spills. And listen: there's a relentless rhythmic drum-beat propelling us ever forward—toward the next thing, and the thing after that, and the thing after that. It's either the stereo down the hall with the bass turned up a touch too high, or it's the heartbeat of this amazing campus."

So, I guess my point in this editor's note was that things change, but things stay the same. We can move to a new building but we can still, you can probably come on this campus and see things that you saw forty years ago, with how we're exploring and trying and building and enjoying this community of people. I think that OSU is generally full of curious and interested and engaged people. I think that there's a college student stereotype of the apathetic person who drinks too much, maybe, but you could talk to the frattiest bro and he'd still have this really cool interest in like formula racing or being involved in the Phillipino club or something where you're not just one thing; you're a lot of things. I think a lot of us buy into the idea and reality of intersectionality. And we allow each other to express our various parts.

CP: Well said. How much of yourself have you thrown into this project over the last year?

JD: How much of this is the Jodie Show? That's hard to answer. I have an editor's note at the beginning of all three. I wrote a lot of pieces in the fall issue, because we didn't have many writers, and fewer pieces in the winter and yet fewer in the spring. So, my work personally has been getting gradually smaller, yay. My own sense of style has been in here a lot. But the things I'm interested in, I only really have a few topics that I've really wanted to hammer in to make sure happened. For example, the spring issue I have a story—I don't know if it's actually going to make it in the print version of the magazine, but somebody came to the honor's thesis fair and took photos and did interviews, because I'm an honors student and that's really important to me. Now, is that important to the rest of the school? I think that there is a group of six hundred honors students who are going to be happy about the shout-out. If it was another editor, I don't think that story would have made it in.

[0:30:25]

So, I'm kind of happy to have some editorial control there in getting a couple things I'm interested in put out there, but ultimately I'm thinking if I'm making a magazine that nobody reads, what's the point? If I'm making this Jodie's Favorite Things Magazine, then I'm not spending student fees wisely, I'm not being a good...I don't think there's a word for it. Well, I'll think of it later, but I'm not helping the students as my obligation requires me to.

That's going to be bugging me that I don't know the word. Whatever.

CP: I'm interested, as well, in your experience as a manager. You have quite a bit of experience managing people from the radio days, and now with this project I would assume there's been some differences and perhaps some growth in that area as well?

JD: Yeah. It's interesting, last night I was looking at Myers-Briggs personality types because, I don't know, I think that there's some sort of mystical magic in them. I am an ENFJ, which is classified as the Protagonist, which makes me a "charming and inspiring leader." It tells me that I'm best in a leadership position because I can get people onboard and have buy-in, which I think has been invaluable in making Beaver's Digest happen. But something that I suffer from greatly is I'm so, so conflict-averse, and that's something that I had just major issues with last year, that I'm still struggling with this year. Just last night I had a writer who was late to a deadline and he didn't know he was late to deadline because he hadn't been checking the emails telling him when the deadline is, and I'm just like "dude," and I didn't know how to talk to him about it without like—I was emailing him or Facebook messaging him or something and I had all of this opportunity to write exactly what I wanted to and word it perfectly and I was still freaking out, and it's like, because I'm like "what if he doesn't like me?" and it's the most ridiculous thing, because my job isn't to have people like me, although that helps for me to inspire people to get stuff done.

But I wish that this year I had grown in that area, but I haven't. The ways that I have grown, I think, are in learning how to create systems that are easy for other people to follow. So, I guess in radio I would say all of the DJs get this email that I might send to you once and then come to the all-DJ meeting and I'll give you all of your information there, and staff come to the staff meeting, and if you're not there, you miss out. Maybe I'll post notes, maybe I won't. And that doesn't work well to get things done, because there are going to be people who miss out, who don't understand or are a little apathetic and don't care. So, that's not conducive for getting things done, so I build systems like you know that you have exactly one week to get a story in from the day that you went and got the interviews and stuff, you have one week from that day to turn it in. Then I don't need to tell them, I don't need to send out an email with a due date; they know.

They know where to post it, because I have a whole Google doc filled with the guidelines and I said enough times during the first time, like they'd ask me "when is this due?" "Look at the Google doc." "Should I put a 'Dr.' in front of this professor's name?" "Look at the Google doc." So, I kind of build systems where people knew where to go if they had questions and people were able to take ownership in their responsibilities. So, except for a few cases, those systems have worked pretty well. I'm organizing—I'm organizing a hundred DJs who I play with loosely; I'm organizing maybe thirty volunteers who I work with very closely. And so, learning how to organize all of that effort and stay in touch with everybody without having to just have one-on-one conversations with every single person about all of their responsibilities, that would be exhausting, and this time, because I have those systems in place and I've built things that work for kind of everyone—asterisk: everyone but a select few who have to adapt, like I have to adapt to them—I would say that's how I've grown most as a leader. And that's also helped me with my personal organization, and that'll be useful to me in my future.

CP: Well, we've broached the topic of radio, is that something you were able to stay involved with over the course of this past year?

[0:35:24]

JD: Yeah, yeah. I wanted to keep doing a radio show, I wanted to do a show called Cover Story, which was a show that was done by a DJ—I got permission to use the name—and I did covers of, I don't know, artist makes a song, another artist does the same song, cover. And then I realized [whispers] Beaver's Digest should have a radio show. So I turned Cover Story, because I was like oh cute, Cover Story, like a magazine. So, I turned Cover Story into the Beaver's Digest radio show and I had a guest, three guests, hopefully, that'd like ideally come on in a week and we'd spend twenty minutes of an hour just talking about what is your club doing this week.

Generally I would have like a club event happening that week and I would invite somebody from that club to either preview that event or follow up on that event, saying like "well, what did you do this week" or "what's coming up" or "what are you excited about" or "what do you do in general, how does somebody get involved?" We'd end up having these really fun and interesting conversations and I would talk to, daily, like three to four people for an hour's worth of radio. I would record it, put it up as a podcast, and again, it would keep Beaver's Digest going more than just once a term. Now we're having a product that comes out once a week, and that was really good.

The move to the Student Experience Center halted Cover Story for a good five weeks this term, and we weren't able to begin, and then by the time we began, I was knee-deep in my honor's thesis and I was exhausted and I had a bunch of other things to do, so I was just like well, I'm going to stop doing Cover Story, the Beaver's Digest show, and revert that time slot back to an old show that I did last year called the Fourth Dimension where I played progressive rock and just spend that hour every week just sort of rocking out by myself in the booth. I miss doing interviews, but it's a lot less stress, because we're needing people and getting like four people onboard to like—or if they can't make the show but they still want to be interviewed, then like recording their interview, editing it down to be good for radio, it's a lot of work.

And I'm glad to not be doing that my last term, on top of everything else, but I'm so glad that we got to have Beaver's Digest and KBVR-FM had that collaboration. And Halie's expressed interest in continuing that collaboration next year, so we'll see how the radio manager, upcoming one, responds to that.

CP: Yeah, that's a cool idea of doing a radio show as a way of emotional release.

JD: Yeah, I love to just use it that way. Music is a really fantastic way of self-expression and you don't even need to pick up your own instrument for it. You just put on some headphones, or not, you can just sit in a room and feel your feelings. I think a good song makes you feel feelings that you felt before and you're like "oh, I can totally relate," and a great song makes you feel things you've never experienced before. There are a lot of really great breakup songs. I'm in a relationship with somebody who I've been with for eight years; we've never had another significant other, we started dating at the end of middle school and it's just kind of remarkable that we stayed together this whole time, and we're doing swell but we've never experienced a breakup, which is weird. And a great song can make me feel like that kind of anguish. Anyway, I mean I can't know, but kind of a little. Anyway, so great music can make you feel a lot of things, and I think DJs are really tuned into that and use it for their benefit and also use their time on the air as a platform to help other people feel.

CP: There was a nice story about the closing down of the radio station, the old one, were you involved with that, and what was that like, if you were there?

JD: Yeah, I was at Farewell to Snell, or as some of us called it kind of secretly, we called it Snell You Later. Yeah, I was there. I provided popcorn; I have this air-blowing popcorn maker, and you melt the butter and you put it on, you put on your toppings and it's delicious, and I provided popcorn. And Beaver's Digest office was located kind of down the hall from KVBR through the fire exit and then like on the side, so it was kind of hard to find us, but I also hosted a game of Cards Against Humanity down there, and I actually, while Jack Kemp, the engineering overload master, was taking people on tours in the Student Experience Center, those left behind would kind of hang out in my office and play Cards Against Humanity. I had a game with like twelve people going, and it was awful and terrible and fun, and probably inappropriate for a school campus, but we had a good time. We had bands in.

[0:40:23]

What was interesting was that—radio has been immensely successful this year. Matt, the station manager, better manager than I ever was, he is stellar. He knows how to—he's just a great leader and I'm constantly in awe of how he does things. He—after I left, a lot of DJs graduated, came back with a DJ population and then he just grew it and grew it and grew it immensely, so that by the time we were doing the Farewell to Snell thing there were like a hundred-forty DJs, and many of them had no idea who I was, so I would just like hang out there being like "yes, former station manager," and none of them knew me, and I thought it was really kind of cool to be anonymous in a place where everybody used to know me. I think it'll be fun to come back to Beaver's Digest in like two years and have everyone go like "who's that lady?"

But yeah, the Farewell to Snell thing was really fun. It was really radio-oriented, and I think maybe the Barometer people downstairs who were having production were not super happy with the noise. But yeah, that was a blast.

CP: Well, you are in a good position to give us some perspective and some insight into the SEC, so I'm sure you've been—

JD: Yeah.

CP: --been there a lot and you've got a sense from a couple different directions and—

JD: I live there.

CP: Tell us what it's like.

JD: It's incredibly different, and we're in an awkward place. So, Snell Hall, every medium was siloed. We had like five different locations and everyone lived in their own location and barely touched each other. And we tried to bridge some of that gap a little bit; KBVR-FM had a game called Snell Golf where they would bat like a little cap stress ball around with some sticks, and I had hole four in my office; people came to visit me sometimes. But the systems we had in place in Snell Hall for getting stuff on, for printing things even, and for ordering supplies were based on how we were all siloed. So now, in the Student Experience Center, we are all in this large, just giant workspace. We call it the bullpen, which is what newsrooms used to call themselves. Some people object to the name bullpen because it suggests a male-dominated area, but I personally think of it as a place of creative chaos.

And we're so used to having our own individual spaces that sometimes it can be awkward. For example, if KBVR-TV are working on editing several videos and being noisy on one side of the room and the Barometer is in production and they're used to complete silence, there can be a little bit of tension, because they want quiet and they need to be able to work with the volume happening. Or, I'm used to having staff meetings—God, this was a huge pain—I'm used to having staff meetings in my little office that actually was bigger than anyone else's office, but I was used to being able to have a place, say "come to this place, we will have a place to discuss things." Another beginning of working at the SEC; there weren't any meeting spaces. So, I would have a group of like eight people come to my little cubicle, be like "so, where are we going to have our meeting? I don't know."

So, the systems for ordering supplies and for sharing space and not leaving food everywhere and getting meetings going and all of those little things still have to be ironed out, because our physical environment is different. And because of those previous silos and the years and years of sort of rivalries between mediums, there can just be a lot of tension, and so it's going to take I think years, a year, hopefully, maybe a couple, to get new cycles of students in so that the people who knew the silos are out and the people who never knew the silos can just react to their collaborative work environment.

There is just a mentality that needs to leave. My mentality, having spent three years in Snell in my silos, needs to just get out of there before the new—so that the new people can come in with their new systems and their new ideas of productivity. But as of now, me and my colleagues are kind of slowing things down. And I think that there could be some help on the professional end, too.

[0:45:09]

CP: Do you think the umbrella of The Orange Media Network will help with that as well?

JD: No.

CP: No?

JD: Currently, no. In the future, I hope, but right now there's some of us who kind of roll our eyes because we've never felt supported by each other. Oh, I should talk about the yoga pants incident.

CP: Please do.

JD: There's an incident named after it, yeah.

CP: It'll be the first for this project, I'm sure.

JD: Oh, this is great. Okay, spring 2014, Prism art and lit magazine publishes a story called "Yoga Pants." I think the author is like Nick Sullivan or something, and it's four verses, four lines per verse, rhyming every two lines, I don't know, but it's basically talking about how this guy goes around campus and sees women in yoga pants and really likes them, really likes how the yoga pants emphasizes their assets. And acrostically it reads "damn girl, that butt." And I remember reading it when it was submitted, because I was working, you know, I just worked with Megan a lot of the time, the Prism editor. I remember reading it and being like "oh my gosh, this is so funny, and kind of offensive, and I wonder if it's going to get in," and it did.

Okay, so that was spring 2014, now it's spring 2015 and we had the Student Experience Center grand opening party, and in that grand opening party we gave out tote bags that say "Orange Media Network" and inside those tote bags were an issue of Beaver's Digest, an issue of Prism, an issue of Barometer. And somebody opened their tote bag after leaving, pulled out the Prism and flipped through and found "Yoga Pants" from last spring, and that person was immediately offended and outraged and she posted on Things Overheard at OSU, which is like a group on Facebook that has about, more than twelve thousand OSU students, alums, faculty, staff, people who—

CP: Yeah, it seems like it's kind of its own little force on campus.

JD: It is, yeah. Posted a picture of "Yoga Pants" and it became, as far as I know, the longest thread, with more than eight hundred comments on this thread about "Yoga Pants," about people saying "wow, this is sexist and misogynistic and terrible and awful, it's bad poetry, it's bad writing," other people saying "it's funny, don't get your panties in a twist, this is just students being students." And Megan, the Prism editor, was like "this could not be better publicity," because this thread happened the night of submission deadlines, and so she just kind of joined the conversation, she was like "Prism editor here, submit your funny/deep/offensive poetry right now."

And it was really funny until the next day, or maybe two days after, the Barometer publishes an editorial headline: "Yoga Pants Not Offensive, Just Bad" and then goes on to talk about poor taste and how the editors of Prism and their—God, I wonder what the word is, like judgement committee or something—it tries to describe their process and was factually inaccurate. And the way that the bullpen is set up is that you have the TV cubicles, where the TV manager and the film production supervisor hang out, the radio manager and team cubicle, Beaver's Digest and Prism sharing a cubicle because we only come out once a term, so we can share a space, I guess, and the Barometer cubicle.

So literally, if the Barometer had any questions about factual anything they could have looked over the cubicle edge and been like "hey Megan, how does Prism work?" and they didn't, and they didn't cue her in and they didn't let her know that they were about to call a piece that she published "bad." And they had every right to do that, to run an editorial. They've run negative feedback on many things on campus, but we're all under the same house, right? So, you'd think that they could have at least let her know. I'm kind of the opinion where sometimes the Barometer gets heat on Things Overheard at OSU and I would comment and Justin would comment, the TV manager, would comment something like "well guys, keep in mind that the Barometer is made up of students just like you, and they also have this really tough job, so I'm sorry that they might have put a typo in the headline, but keep in mind that they're learning," and we'll come to the Barometer's defense, and the editors will express their appreciations, saying "wow, we really felt like you were on our team." And they didn't show that to Prism at that time.

[0:50:22]

And so, it's really, really hard politics, because they were totally in the right to do what they did, but it was also hard because really, getting back to the beginning of the question, we're the Orange Media Network. So, we've gone from being the Daily Barometer and Prism and Beaver's Digest and radio and TV to being the Orange Media Network, and so we need to treat each other that way, but we're not yet. We're always trying, like Beaver's Digest and TV recently posted a congratulations to the Barometer for getting best newspaper in the state, student newspaper daily, I don't know, they got an award, it was a big deal, we congratulated them, because we're trying to create that environment where this is our house, but there's a lot of tension between a lot of different people and we're just not sharing the house yet.

CP: That's really interesting, thanks for sharing that story.

JD: Yeah.

CP: I wouldn't have expected to go that direction—

JD: I mean personally—

CP: --when I heard the yoga pants incident.

JD: I'm sorry. Did it answer the question, ultimately?

CP: Absolutely.

JD: Okay, cool.

CP: That's really interesting. I want to ask about the new radio station. I assume it's a big upgrade?

JD: It's beautiful, I love it. Functionality-wise there—see, I don't know how much I can talk about it without getting into technical detail. I actually wrote a thesis on podcast productions, so I can go into kind of a lot of detail about it, but basically the computers are newer and better and run faster and the technology, the software on the computers, are more intuitive and easy to use, and when we went through training we learned how to use everything in a way that we weren't trained to in using the old software. The hardware, like the mixing board; you know when you see DJs they'll be like [makes whooshing sound] with the sliders and stuff, lots more options for what you can import. So, for my radio show I use like the CD player and the computer and my microphone, basically, but I could use streaming in from the TV station or maybe like a webcam from outside the building or something like that.

We have barely scratched the surface on the capabilities of the radio station, and I wish so much that I could be here like three years from now when we've really figured it out. Yeah, I mean just stuff works better. Like there were times when I was radio manager where I was worried that I would be woken up at 3:00 AM because just everything stopped. And sometimes that would happen, like in the middle of the night, just why won't the automation turn on? Why can't I end my show and have the computer play music for me until the next DJ comes on? Like they'd have to keep putting in CDs and playing music, because the computer froze, basically. And I think that that's not something that they have to worry about now. I don't know if that answered the question.

CP: Yeah, yeah. Sure.

JD: Okay.

CP: Well, I asked you a question in our last interview that I received a surprising answer to; I asked you about the music scene in Corvallis and you said you didn't have the ability to consume it or experience it because you weren't twenty-one yet.

JD: I'm twenty-one now, that's been fun.

CP: How's that been?

JD: It's been really great, because yeah, a lot of bands, a lot of music will play at bars primarily, and in the evening, when minors are not permitted into bars, and it's been really fun being able to explore all of what Corvallis has to offer. The bands I've seen, it feels like there's sort of a handful of really, really active bands, and so I can go to Bombs Away Café one night and to Cloud & Kelly's the next night and maybe see the same group, or Dock 22 doing an acoustic set or something, or open mic nights. We'll have a lot of the same people, but it's really fun because you can tell that they're incredibly passionate about what they do. They're not, you know, "oh, I just kind of do this on the side, I kind of picked up the guitar, and anyway, here's Wonderwall," you know. But they really want to, yeah, use music as a form of expression, which is what I talked about earlier.

[0:55:03]

Corvallis music, I've found, is incredibly energetic; people who see shows aren't especially as energetic, so when you're playing at—when they play at Bombs Away Café, there aren't all these people up dancing or anything, they're just sort of enjoying their tacos. But I also think that there's some fun diversity in what kind of music is being played. So, there are obviously like hard rock groups. We also have funk, which growing up in North Idaho, no funk, no soul influences, not as much R&B, not as much hip hop, because the only musicians in Post Falls, Idaho were maybe like high schoolers in crappy bands. So Corvallis music, I feel, has a lot of well-informed influences. I like that.

CP: Let's talk a bit about school. How's it been for you balancing classwork with all this other stuff you've been doing?

JD: It's been fine. I'm graduating with a 3.64, so I've got an honors cord and I'm proud of what I've done. I've been in Honors College, and a lot of times, like when I have to miss class for something, like this upcoming weekend my sister's getting married, so I have to skip class tomorrow, and I let my professor know, or my instructor, and she was like "oh, that's fine, I trust that you're going to get your work in on time." So personally, I have been doing just fine. And digital communication arts is a highly creative nature, so we don't have a whole lot of examinations, there is not a whole lot of like fact-based work. There's some, but not a ton. Right now I'm in documentaries, so I'm making a film. And so—

CP: Making a film on the side?

JD: [Laughter] yeah, I guess that's a thing. And so yeah, I've been able to balance fairly well, I think because I'm in a creative major where I don't have to put my nose to the grindstone, studying all the time. If it was my second year and I was doing—or maybe, I guess it was my third year that I was doing media theory and media effects and diffusion of innovation, so more academic, study-this-really-hard-so-you-can-get-it-right classes, I'd be like [makes overwhelmed expression], everything would be so hard right now. And I guess I've managed to do it during the KVBR FM year, but I'm just thinking, like my partner who I was discussing earlier is in computer science, and he is like eight credits shy of a math minor, just because of the classes he has to take for a computer science major. And the hours and hours that he puts in just programming or just doing math homework, I would not be able to run this if I was him, or in that major. So, I think that I benefit a lot from studying what I'm studying. It's more flexible. It's challenging in a different way, but in a more flexible way, thank goodness.

CP: Yeah. It clearly suits you.

JD: Yeah, I like it.

CP: You mentioned your honors thesis, I'm interested in kind of the overall Honors College experience for you, and specifically the thesis process.

JD: Okay. Honors College is a small selection of students, and I think there—I'm remembering about six hundred students. It might have grown since then. I applied to Honors College as I was applying to OSU and I was able to tell them that I had a high SAT score, I was able to write a cool essay for them, kind of your typical application procedure, and they accepted me and I was very happy. To get your honors degree you need to take a certain percent of your Bacc Core with honors classes. So, instead of taking World Religions, you can take honors Feminism and the Bible to get the same requirement taken care of. I guess I took honors World Religions. I think Feminism and the Bible satisfies literature and the arts or something. So, you have to take certain numbers of honors Baccalaureate Core and then a certain number of honors upper division.

And I think, for a liberal arts major, the honors upper division classes, the three hundred and four hundred levels, are kind of difficult because OSU is like a science and engineering school. A high percent of the students are science and engineers, and it has a high result of honors students, taking a representative sample, is also science and engineering. So, they'll offer course choices that sort of favor those students. I don't think it's a bad thing, I just think it's just sort of sometimes hard for me to find a three hundred or four hundred level honors class that I'm interested in, that I have enough background knowledge to succeed in, being a liberal arts student.

[1:00:32]

So, I got around a little bit of that by studying abroad, and I did that between my sophomore and junior year. Study abroad credits count as upper division honors, so yay. So, I got that requirement done and then finally the last big hurdle to your honors degree is your thesis, and they encourage you to kind of work on it in stages. In fact, they have a whole program that's called Thesis Success in Stages. Freshman year you take a seminar; "here's what's involved with your thesis." Sophomore year you take a class that meets three times in a term saying meet with a student who is working with their thesis right now, meet with a potential thesis advisor and start thinking about what you want to do your thesis on. Junior year you begin your research, senior year you write your paper. And so, I went through a lot of different thesis ideas and a couple mentors before I finally just decided that done is better than good and that I would dig in and write my thing and get it done. And I am presenting it a week from tomorrow to my mentor and committee.

CP: And this was on podcasting?

JD: Yeah. So, I'll bring up my partner again, he and I looked at each other and we were like "okay, aside from all of the experience we have, aside from financial concerns about anything, if we could do whatever we wanted in our lives, what would it be? And let's make our thesis work towards that goal." And he said "I would want to be a stream-your-own twitch.tv, which is like a videogamer streaming as they're playing video games. It's really popular. People like to watch other people play videogames. He watches other people play video games; he wants to be on the other end as the entertaining individual. And I said "I would want to produce a podcast. I want to be somebody who's telling stories and connecting a community who might be pretty busy and not be able to connect with each other in other ways." Podcasting is great for that because you can listen in the car during a commute.

So, we were like "okay great, let's make a videogame podcast, let's make a podcast about videogame news and reviews," and so he can take his special videogame land, all of the things that he's doing normally; reviewing games, playing them, keeping up on news, he can talk about it in a microphone and then I can make it sound pretty, which is what I like to do. And so, we made a podcast called The Sweet Roll, which is kind of a double pun. There are a couple of video games in which an item called a sweet roll, like a cinnamon bun, basically, kind of happen. It's—context is not interesting to explain for this one. But also we also do some tabletop games, because those have been gaining in popularity, and so like if you're playing Dungeons & Dragons and you're rolling the d20 and it lands on 20 and you get that critical hit or whatever, it's a sweet roll, right?

CP: Mhmm.

JD: So anyway, we called it The Sweet Roll and we do news and reviews and then we did a thesis on the process of creating that podcast, and we wrote it from two different perspectives, because we each had to submit one, and his was on the perspective of being a host and producer, so coming up with the content and how he developed the criteria that he uses for reviewing and sort of the videogame theory that helps him to create an informed opinion and stuff like that. And mine was all about technological competence, I guess, so here's the process of me learning how to make radio work, and then how that translates to a podcast and the history of podcasts and why it works and why people like it and how to do it.

So, our theses combined give a very whole picture of what The Sweet Roll is and in front of and behind the scenes. And it's just been really fun, because I get to work on this project with somebody I like a lot, and I get to use it to further kind of my ultimate goal. And it has, I recently accepted a job offer from somebody in Eugene. It's a part time job, but it's editing a podcast.

CP: Wow.

JD: And Kenny is looking forward to—he has an internship where he'll be programming, but in his off hours he'll be running a Twitch stream. So, we're going to go for those things that might not be super profitable but are really what we want to give to the world.

CP: Experiential learning.

[1:05:13]

JD: Yeah, and so I'm sort of glad that that approach worked. I mean, I could have done a thesis on making a magazine, that would have been substantial, but this was good too. My thesis ended up being just over fifty pages long, I think his was just over thirty. And mine was full of pictures, his wasn't, so that bulks it out. And so, we had to work back and forth with our mentor, her name is Sara Jameson, she's in the Department of Writing, Literature and Film, and she's been an incredible resource to us. She doesn't know a whole lot about video games, but she teaches many of the nonfiction writing courses for writing students. So, I know her from that. And she is just incredibly supportive. She's a really great cheerleader for us and helps us to be motivated and on track. And our committee is made of two people from the media department; there's Shawna Kelly, who specializes in videogame theory, and she's smart and funny and wonderful, and Finn John, who runs his own podcast, and it's one of my very favorites and I love working with him.

So, we kind of have a whole group of people who specialize in small areas of what we're doing. And we presented it at the honors thesis fair last Friday and we dressed up as Mario and Luigi and had a very creative poster and were just sort of fun, and everyone else was like incredibly professional and they looked super great and their posters were like scientific and lovely, and then there was us, just like bouncing around with our dumb little mustaches and costumes. And it was really fun, it was a good way to spend two and a half hours. And yeah, and a week from tomorrow we'll be giving our defense where we'll just be basically running through a slideshow of what each of our theses say. We're allowed to co-present, we got permission, usually people can't do that, but we got permission. We'll co-present and then one of us will leave the room and the committee will grill us and then that person will leave and the other person will come in and they'll basically give us suggestions on what to do to improve our thesis, we'll make those changes, we'll submit it by Friday, 5:00 PM of week ten and then we'll be done. We'll be thesis scholars.

I already got my honors stole and my tam, so a special hat, and I'll be wearing those during graduation, the main ceremony at Reser, and then the department of the ECS does a special little smaller and more intimate graduation. So, Kenny's actually going to be borrowing my tam and stole so we don't have to buy two. But he'll need his own gown, because he's like six inches taller than me.

CP: Well, that's a great idea, and it sounds like it must have been a lot of fun and very rewarding to do it that way.

JD: It was. And sadly we were so busy writing our theses and stuff this year that we didn't actually get to record that many podcasts, and so we're looking forward to actually continuing that project after graduation, because The Sweet Roll's a really fun idea. I just kind of want to do, not for study or academic purposes, but just because I love it. So yeah, we hope to keep it going.

CP: Yeah. Well, I've got a couple of OSU question as we sort of close up a little bit. These are actually questions I asked you a year ago, and maybe you remember your answers, I don't know, but the first one is just your sense of the issues that are important to students at OSU these days.

JD: What matters to OSU...the more I'm at OSU, the more I realize that I can't speak for other people's experiences. But I think a lot of us want to be heard. I think a lot of us are used to being heard; we had class sizes of thirty per class growing up in high school and middle school, we had attentive parents, attentive teachers and all of the privileges that come along with that, and then we're dropped into college and we have a lot of expenses and a lot of scary things and a lot of not being secure, and a lot of choices that come out of that, and we're not sure that our individual experiences are being understood or appreciated. So, when we have huge rallies that say "lower our textbook prices" and then nothing happens, well A: we feel unheard and then B: we also need to understand that that's not how the process works. We can't just have a rally and then boom, fifty dollars off your textbooks.

[1:10:05]

So, I think that along with all of the noise we make, we need to work on being informed. There is blame to share. Also things that matter is, like I mentioned earlier, being part of communities, plural. Like I said, the fratty Greek bro can be a part of many other things other than his frat, or I am more than Beaver's Digest, in a lot of ways. So, I think that our multidimensionality and our various friend groups play a lot into what we care about. And I think also we're fairly cause oriented. I haven't met a lot of students who are just actively like "ugh, I don't care about politics," you know, "I don't care about—I don't have an opinion on GMOs," you know. Everyone I know has an opinion on GMOs. And so, we are invested and we care about issues.

CP: Yeah. That segues a little bit into the next question, and it's just sort of what I call the intuitional self-esteem, or how students feel about OSU, about how it stands now, about being Oregon Staters and about where the university is heading.

JD: I feel like a lot of people are kind of against The Man right now.

CP: Well, they're college students.

JD: I think we might be more successful in our goals if we tried to work with The Man. And I think sometimes The Man really tries to work with us. The documentary I mentioned earlier, it's about Take Back the Night, and Dr. Ed Ray was there and Dr. Susie Brubaker-Cole was there, and that's—they are The Man and they're demonstrating that they care about things that we care about, like sexual violence on campus. So, if we work with them, they'll work with us too, I think. If we rail on them for being jerks or whatever—not those two specifically but again, The Man, the institution, whoever's in Kerr, that only creates a sense of animosity that results in them kind of feeling like being unhelpful to us. So yeah, it's a complicated diplomatic line that we have to tread.

CP: Well, my last question was basically about what lies ahead, and you've sort of answered that on some level, but maybe we could talk a bit about what your OSU experience has meant to you and sort of how it's prepared you for this next phase of your life.

JD: Yeah. I mean, I have a friend who's about to graduate and he's going to put on his motor board "$90,000 for a piece of paper," and I think that sentiment is there for a lot of people. I think a lot of folks are like "college is a means to an end that is a job," and perhaps they feel they could have learned all of those job skills not from college, but a college experience to me, I mean yeah, I could have learned to produce a documentary by watching videos on lynda.com or YouTube and getting the software and doing it, but I wouldn't have known that I wanted to do that if I hadn't had access to the programs for free on the computers at school or the encouragement from the instructors to tell me like "you're pretty good at this." I think that's valuable. I'm not sure if it's worth ninety thousand dollars, but it's valuable.

The other thing of immense value is just opening your eyes to the many people of the world, or at least the many people of Oregon. I think that we can be more sensitive, better community members if we're part of this large college environment where we're exposed to a lot of different thoughts. We can learn how to not be argumentative when we disagree, which is something that I don't think you can learn in other places, or it takes a lot to learn these things that you learned in four years here.

Yeah, there are a lot of not academic things that I've learned at OSU that I wouldn't trade for anything, and I would definitely, if I had kids, encourage them to go to college, even if they found it impractical. I don't know, maybe if I had a kid who wanted to be an aesthetician or something, like okay, you go to the trade school of your choice, but also take time to learn how to care about other people and to learn how to care about learning, to be a lifelong learner, to enjoy the process of diversifying your mind. Because that can only serve to help you in whatever you do. There's very few jobs where you're alone in the room. And college helps you be good at being in a room with other people.

CP: Well Jodie, yours has been an exceptionally rich experience it seems, as an undergraduate here, and I want to thank you for checking in with us twice over the course of the year and being so thoughtful and eloquent in telling us your story. Thank you very much, best of luck.

JD: Thank you. Thanks.

[1:15:30]