I once sat enraptured as an editor from the Los Angeles Times revealed their secret to a successful journalism career: verbs.

Your brain hooks onto sentences pulsing with verbs that muscle out abstract nouns. And the engine of published work is, of course, reporting. Reporting makes you move. 

The Daily became my testing ground for this advice at Stanford. 

Reporting and editing for The Daily mapped how I moved through Stanford, and in turn, magnified my imagination of what Stanford is. The Daily is where Stanford’s weirdest contradictions leak out: the bookstore siphoning money back in the ’90s, the administration stonewalling a co-op’s fight for existence, the 94% of elevators on campus operating with expired permits.

I couldn’t understand Palo Alto through its tiny airport. I couldn’t learn much about Stanford by talking exclusively to people who look like me, vote like me, or take the same classes as me. So — I moved. I chased leads on the Caltrain. I raced against midnight deadlines as the clock bled out. Pedaling furiously towards The Daily building. Slamming my eyelid shut a millisecond too late as a kamikaze fly struck my cornea — The Daily to ER pipeline. But at least the story got in. I asked interview questions that made me uncomfortable. I asked interview questions that made other people uncomfortable.

Palm trees lost their postcard stillness as I began to imagine Stanford in verbs. And as I wrote these stories, I began to think about how I moved through campus, and in tandem, the world. 

People might say they “do journalism” the way they talk about hiking or baking bread on the weekends. Casually. But reporting in my world is more akin to performing surgery. Not that it saves lives (though sometimes it can), but there’s both a necessary responsibility and a danger to wielding a set of skills that move like a scalpel: cracking open systems, twisting betrayals, sharpening innocence.

Oddly, my motorcycle instructor taught me this first. The first lesson I learned while riding a motorcycle: panic kills you faster than speed. You tend to fixate directly on the thing you’re trying not to hit. Your body follows your eyes. If you panic, KABOOM! You crash (non-spectacularly). 

In reporting, keeping composure is just as important. 

Panic colors my worst interviews. Instead of listening, I fixate on proving that I’m insightful, or impressive, or emotionally vulnerable. There’s a tinge of absolute horror; embarrassment burns. Worse, people stop trusting you with their stories. When I crash an interview, I don’t just fall alone. I take the source down with me. 

In Janet Malcolm’s introduction to “The Journalist and the Murderer,” she writes,

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Every journalist inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. (Spoiler: the man interviewed was, in fact, a murderer). 

Betray is a verb. Interviews can feel intimate enough to resemble friendships. But when the story comes out, sources sometimes confront an uncomfortable reality: the journalist is never writing just for them. The journalist is accountable to editorial standards, audience readership and their own understanding of the truth. I think it’s important to remain conscious of the possibility that every story belongs to someone before it belongs to you. 

I moved through The Daily during my years at Stanford in a series of canon events: from beat reporter to desk editor to managing editor. Being DEI chair taught me that who you choose to cover is intentional and important – a lesson I’ll be bringing with me to Egypt after graduation. 

The Daily found a way of saving me from imagining Stanford too solemnly. The alien signs on our ‘all gender’ bathroom doors smile extraterrestrially. Our cabinet of curiosities is filled with Costco snacks and, briefly, a deflated discoball piñata. The Inkbowl, where I played flag football for the first time and where our team absolutely demolished Berkeley’s newspaper team, remains one of the purest forms of The Daily’s journalistic accountability.

And then there were the people. 

The Daily introduced me to fabulous people who carry so many different versions of themselves that my imagination of a ‘Stanford student’ stretched and ballooned. 

The Daily embedded itself into conversations with long-time journalists at Stanford who would eventually become mentors. Janine Zacharia, whose class carried me from dissecting USAID cuts in Cambodia to reporting on the ground for The Nation. RB, my first Stanford journalism professor, whose advice shaped my coverage of the Los Angeles “No Kings” protests. Felicity Barringer, who reminded me that true expertise requires knowing your greatest critics, and who gifted me her cunningly funny “HELL” Norway hat. And Jim Wheaton, a fantastic lawyer whose iconic First Amendment Law class introduced me to Janet Malcolm’s reading. 

My annotation of Malcolm’s introduction to “The Journalist and the Murderer” is taped to my wall. Next to it is an issue of The Daily with the headline, “Community reacts to Iran war.” Stanford pushes you to figure out the difference you want to make in the world. Reporting, at least, gave me a practical answer. 

There’s a saying I learned in Muay Thai training, “less ego, more soul.” Some of the best reporters I’ve met during college are not the loudest or smartest. They are unusually patient listeners (and silence takes skill to stomach, let’s be honest). They ask difficult questions in ways that feel curious rather than extractive. I’m definitely projecting here, so I’ll just own it. There is a lot of “the difference I want to make in the world” tied up with journalism, and by extension, The Daily. 

Over time, I realized that nearly everything I love doing is a smorgasbord of verbs: reporting, criss-crossing continents, motorcycling, translating languages, etc. The nouns — the publications, fellowships, internships and (very soon!) degrees — arrived later. 

Reporting for The Daily pushed me to move around Stanford in ways and to places that I couldn’t have imagined. This was a symptom of flooding the Stanford in my imagination with the raw, chaotic noise of real lives. Maybe most importantly, reporting imbued respect into my day-to-day interactions. With a professional license to be curious, I treated my worldview, at least momentarily, as the least interesting in the room. If Stanford is meant to teach you how to think, The Daily taught me how to notice – which, most days, feels more urgent.