Blanchard began by reflecting on a moment during her senior year at Wellesley when she learned, “I just had to put pen to paper and get the work done. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. I’ve taken that piece of advice and just tried to get the work done for all of these years, a few decades.”

 Blanchard said she hoped sharing her experience would allow Wellesley students to “think about how you can do similar things, engage in the world.” 

As she provided background on the current global economy, Blanchard discussed a number of external factors affecting how resources are used in the world and how that in turn shapes geopolitics. For example, competition has increased between nations, such as “the growing and intensified great power rivalry between the United States and China.” Additionally, global conflicts and war “have enormous implications for the global economy, and the way the global economy is structured today.” Other important factors she noted included the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and technological innovation. 

“We have layers upon layers of issues that intersect and weave together and build together … What do you do when you take all of this and you’re trying to create international economic policy from the US State Department?” Blanchard said.

In her work as chief economist at the State Department Blanchard often had to work to resolve provisions in some pieces of legislation that would lead to unintended or controversial spillover effects. She highlighted three pieces of legislation that had such effects: the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act aimed to “to develop the green technologies that we need here in the United States today,” yet also contained “a bunch of other provisions that have subsidies that encourage companies to build here, not there.” Blanchard described how policies like these could upset allies and companies from other countries. Her office mitigated the issue by finding “a reading of the legislation that is going to make our lives with decarbonization of EV adoption as fast as possible and not upset our allies.” 

Blanchard also described imposing sanctions against Russia as a “huge set of my work …We do not want to support that war in any way, shape or form. So that means don’t send him[Putin] things he needs to execute the war. Obviously military material, missiles, guns, armors, but also all of the military material. What are all those things? Figure it out fast. Do the economics.  Figure out what are all the parts that the Russians might need to do that,” she said.

 Blanchard highlighted the complex aspects of sanctions involving her office tracking flows of commerce to neighboring countries and Russia’s allies to ensure war materials were not being backdoored into the country. “It’s hard work, and it takes a lot of analytics,” she said. 

Finally, Blanchard touched on her career path and “externally valuable lessons from that period.” She described graduating from Wellesley, spending two years in economic consulting, going back to school to earn her PhD then teaching for a number of years before her tenure as Chief Economist. She said while it can be “very tempting to look back at somebody’s resume and say, oh my goodness, that’s so linear,” her path involved numerous indecisions and unexpected opportunities. Her final piece of advice to Wellesley students was to “go through life and your career with that same openness. Just be eager, be curious, go serve. And thank you, because we need you.” 

Image credit: state.gov

Contact the editor(s) responsible for this story: Diya Khanna and Phoebe Rebhorn

This statement by Sandy Sugawara — former journalist and foreign correspondent who now works as a senior advisor to the US Agency for Global Media — was a key takeaway from her lecture on [date of the event], where she spoke to Wellesley students and faculty alike about her book, “Show Me the Way to Go to Home.” In it, she discusses the impact of Japanese internment camps — isolated areas where suspected “conspirators” were kept as a fear-mongering tactic — in the United States during World War II, and the trauma they left many Japanese Americans with after they were disbanded. For Sugawara, this idea of everyday life “turning on a dime” is important for recognizing the struggles of the past, but it also provides a warning for the future: in our often-volatile political climate, things can shift from normal to chaos in the blink of an eye. 

Sandy Sugawara was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Japanese American parents. She found herself drawn to journalism early on, and after hearing about Wellesley College, she toured the campus and fell in love. While at Wellesley, Sugawara pursued journalism and political commentary, and participated in the Wellesley in Washington program. While in D.C. for the summer, she interned with Senator Daniel Inouye, the very first US Representative from the state of Hawaii. After graduating, she got a job working for Congressman Norman Mineta. From there, she entered the field of journalism and international media operations.

Despite her resounding success in the political and global media world, Sugawara stayed close with her family, and it is through her mother and father that she learned the true depth of the trauma Japanese American internment camps inflicted upon them. She recalls sitting with her ailing mother towards the end of her life, when, out of the blue, her mother sat bolt upright and started firing off questions. She asked her daughter why the government forced Japanese Americans into the camps in the first place, why nobody had rushed to aid those trapped in the camps, despite the lack of evidence against them, and why, more than anything, it had happened so quickly and without any significant recognition. She was especially worried, after seeing the news about insurgency in 2019, that this could happen again, and begged Sugawara to “do something to help those dear, dear children.” This startled Sugawara; her whole life, her parents had never openly discussed the significant impact the camps had on their psyche. This sudden outpouring of emotion by her mother, combined with camp documents and remainders of camp life she found a few months later, pushed Sugawara to visit the site her parents had been at during their detainment.  

Sugawara visited the Amiche camp in Colorado first, which was the camp her parents met at. She harkened back to how she felt, standing in the dust of where her family had begun,saying, “I really felt the spirits talking to me through the landscape.” 

Sugawara had always valued photography and the way photographs could transport people as well as convey an emotion that transcended words; she had even made a makeshift darkroom in the Stone-Davis kitchen during her time at Wellesley. It seemed only natural, therefore, that she photographed a place that spoke so deeply to her. But she didn’t want to stop there. 

Sugawara and her colleague committed themselves to seeing all ten camps in the United States that had held Japanese Americans. What they encountered was an untapped depth of history and trauma that reflected the volatility of the American political system in times of war. Confronted by the ruins of barracks, of headstones for babies and soldiers alike, and by domestic moments like a baseball diamond remaining in the dirt, Sugawara knew she had to share her connections with the wider public. She decided to publish “Show Me the Way to Go to Home” with the hope that it would not only educate those who read it, but give them perspective into an area of American history that is often overlooked or repressed. She also wanted to emphasize the hard truth of the Japanese internment camps: the country was not made safer in any way by their existence, and yet they continued to remain operational. 

So what is the great takeaway from Sandy Sugawara’s published work? The author herself leaves that somewhat up in the air, hoping the photographs will affect her viewers in unique ways. But for Wellesley students in particular, Sugawara hopes that the book will inspire them to keep an eye on the political climate around them. In a world of instability, Sugawara argues that we have a responsibility to make sure injustice doesn’t go unaddressed. 

“This is a body of incredibly talented [people], and if they have a story to tell, they should tell it”; in other words, if the “turning of the dime” ever occurs, we should be ready to not just speak on it, but also to work on stopping that turn in the first place,” Sugawara said.

“I petitioned to have things like urban economics and sociology count toward my degree, which I did not realize until I left and went to grad school was super weird [for conventional architecture programs],” Ogbu said. “It allowed me to merge the artistic parts of architecture that I love, with, also, the people piece which I feel like, as I’ve been operating in the field, it’s been part of … really building a case for the way that architecture has historically been viewed for too long, is really about the objects and not so much about the people who are impacted by what we do.”

In 2012, Ogbu took this idea further by founding Studio O, an architectural design consultancy “operating at the intersection of race and space.” She has worked primarily with low-income communities and communities of color. Her work often identifies what communities have been harmed most through past processes and spaces and brings them into a collaborative process to support healing and thriving. Ogbu hopes to further conversations on reparative community development both as a UVA fellow and in her broader work. 

“There’s actually been a long intersection between race and space, and so the lens that I look at space, in particular, is of spatial justice, so, the idea that justice has a geography and that equitable distribution or access to resources, opportunities and outcomes should be a basic human right,” she said. “If we overlay race and class over it, we’ll often see that Black, Indigenous people of color and the poor wind up disproportionately existing in spaces that lack spatial justice, so my work is really to address the harm that that has caused, which is both physical and also emotional, and then look to develop projects and programs that address it.”

These projects include Friendship Court and Reimagine the Innerbelt. The former is a project in Charlottesville, VA working to transform a low-income, affordable housing complex into a less isolated mixed-income neighborhood. Ogbu has been working on Friendship Court since 2015 and anticipates it will conclude its first phase soon. She emphasizes this project as a model of what anti-racist housing can look like. Reimagine the Innerbelt is a project she has been working on since late 2020, which Ogbu describes as a “community healing envisioning process” around a now-decommissioned freeway section that was built over a Black neighborhood in the 1960s.

As a large number of her projects are based in California or are remote, which is where she is based, her fellowship has been remote, but she is slated to be at UVA later this month and in April, which lines up with overseeing the Friendship Court project in person. As a fellow, Ogbu hopes to work with UVA’s equity center and prepare materials for a conference next fall regarding reparative development. Furthermore, she plans on participating in a sustainability conference and conducting work for the beginnings of a book.

“The first month and a half, two months of my fellowship [were] naturally designed to be remote to kindly be able to work around my schedule [and] my projects, but I’ll start making trips to Charlottesville in March and so it’s just exciting to be on the ground there and have real-time conversations with people,” Ogbu said. “The nice thing is that the way the fellowship is set up, it’s supported not only the projects that I have that are engaging specifically with UVA, but also in the projects that I have with this community, so I’m looking forward to getting some more on-the-ground time with the residents of Friendship Court and the nonprofit Piedmont Housing Alliance that I’ve been working with for years.”

These plans coalesce into Ogbu’s goal of having a space to experiment and test ideas that can help change the tone of architecture into more conscientiously creating “a future that honors [the past] and also sets people up for thriving.” She has also been careful to ensure widespread access to her work as a model for what other professionals both within and outside of architecture can and often should do when working on community projects and spaces.

“It’s a demonstration of what is possible and where we can go, and I want everybody to be able to have access to that,” she said. “I’m pretty hardcore about creating tools as much as I can and creating models, which is why I do a lot of talks about the work so that people can share it around and show like, ‘Hey, you could be doing it this way.’ But also, literally creating tools that people can use, so a past project … was: could you create a social impact protocol for affordable housing?”

This semester Ogbu isn’t just planning on being at UVA  Alice Friedman, Grace Slack McNeil professor of American Art and previously Ogbu’s advisor, is retiring, and bringing Ogbu back to the College’s campus to participate in a program Friedman will be having. Ogbu expresses fond memories of the College and notes that her time on campus allowed her to develop her current mental framework of architecture. This year also brings her 25th reunion, providing several opportunities for her to reminisce and reflect on changes to the College’s architecture.

“Wellesley [College] is such an interesting space because it has this history, and people are very connected to the history of that place,” she said. “I can’t speak to it [the Lulu Chow Wang campus center] in terms of its operation as a student center, or as a space to be in. I can only speak to it more from an object perspective, which is funny because that’s kind of the antithesis of how I work. But, I actually think there’s a lot of interesting things about it. … I know that there was some idea that the materials used would kind of alter over time and create an interesting look. I will also say I’m slightly biased because the architect who did that was one of my favorite professors in grad school.”

“Writing is hard and lonely … I honestly feel like I wouldn’t have been able to write a book without all the support I’ve gotten from Wellesley professors, staff, alums and even current students excited about my book,” Bartels said. 

Her book is a nonfiction exploration of people’s love for pets in life and different ways of loving and mourning pets when they die. Bartels first began exploring this topic while completing her MFA program at Columbia University. When she was not working on her thesis, Bartels wrote personal essays about her past pets and her experiences of grief when these pets died. As a child, she felt like her pets were close companions, especially as her older siblings grew up and spent more time away from home.

“My pets were really like my best friends and my companions,” Bartels said. “I loved animals. I felt like I could be my weird self around them and they wouldn’t judge me.”

She remembers her classmates showing interest in her stories and sharing their own experiences with pets and mourning. Bartels was fascinated by her research on the significance of pets and traditions for mourning them. She sold the book in 2019, and her own relationship with pets shifted as she wrote it.  

“I think that writing this book … made me a little less anxious about all the ways pets can die and made me feel more appreciative of just thinking about now and appreciating the time we have together, even if it’s short,” Bartels said.  

She was interested in writing from a young age and first fell in love with nonfiction in high school when asked to write a collection of vignettes based on her life. Towards the end of high school, Bartels took a Wellesley summer course on creative nonfiction and decided that she would continue studying the genre. 

“I totally fell in love with writing and nonfiction and felt like [nonfiction] was a way that I could express myself … in a way as creative and artful as fiction but with tools that I was better equipped with,” Bartels said, who always felt that nonfiction writing came more naturally to her. 

Bartels gained confidence in her writing at Wellesley, where she was a staff writer for Counterpoint and wrote a monthly column about her experiences studying abroad in Russia. She recalls her faculty advisor supporting her work by sending her email responses about her column. 

Throughout her career, Bartels has gained experience through freelance writing and teaching writing, and in 2021, she joined the Wellesley Office of Communications & Public Affairs staff. Presenting her book at Wellesley, she hoped to continue to share her writing experience with students and others who love pets or are interested in writing. Although Zhao has not had many pets in her life, she found the book moving. 

“Good Grief is a really great book,” Zhao said. “I remember really enjoying it and really feeling a lot of emotions about pets and what happens when they’re alive and what happens when they die.” 

During the event, Bartels read passages of her book and answered questions from Zhao and members of the audience. According to Zhao, Bartels invited her to moderate the event after their many conversations about writing. Zhao’s upcoming book Dear Wendy is set to be released in 2024, and she meets with Bartels occasionally to talk about writing and publishing.

“It’s been really nice talking together about books,” Zhao said. 

Bartels shared that she enjoys connecting with other writers through Wellesley events and alum networks. 

“My one piece of advice to any Wellesley student who is interested in writing is to definitely reach out to Wellesley alums,” Bartels said. “The Wellesley community has just been so supportive of me as a writer,” she added.

“It’s about analyzing text closely, learning basic research methods. Right now, I have them struggling over how to use the Oxford English dictionary,” she said. “We’re going to move on to how to find credible sources, which for Taylor Swift is a semi-difficult thing to do, because … there’s too much on the web, and none of it is particularly quotable.”

While this course is primarily about important skills for students interested in humanities, looking at her faculty profile shows that it is unique compared to other introductory courses. Her specialties include Chaucer and gothic and Romantic medievalism. Although medievalism may seem unrelated to current pop culture, Professor Scala points to other kinds of media with medieval roots.

“While the period itself is so historically distant, and its languages tend to be even more difficult than ever I think … it’s still really a place that filmmakers go because there’s just deep interest … in the Middle Ages,” she said. “[For example,] Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are offering these never-ending pathways back to some version of the Middle Ages.”

She also adds that Taylor Swift’s songwriting has further challenges because of the basis in Swift’s real life.

“I hear the intertextuality between the songs, and that’s something interesting. The Swifties in the class kind of know when that’s going on, and their answers to everything are very biographical … I don’t care about that,” she explains. “Her art is this objective piece of art we are going to talk about separate from her life. You don’t need to know what Keats ate on Tuesday [to discuss Keats].”

Professor Scala also has a different perspective on Swift’s music because it was a relatively new interest for her. When the pandemic started, traveling difficulties led to her daughter staying at home more and playing music for the two of them.

“[My daughter] would text me, and we would talk about which songs I really liked and which songs she really liked, and … that was really the album [“Red (Taylor’s Version)”] that got me super interested in using her music to teach this class.”

While “Red (Taylor’s Version)” was her introduction to Swift, Professor Scala has found that her preferences have changed as she teaches the course.

“I would have said a while ago that my favorite song was New Romantics … but since doing all this studying, I really do like the songs on ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore,’” she said. “Right now … I was at the end of summer, obsessed with August and thinking about it a lot, and lately have been thinking about ‘Champagne Problems.’”

Ultimately, Professor Scala aims to broaden her students’ understanding of relationships between texts by using the familiar to compare to historical writing and tropes. She explains that she wants to show connections to tropes and other parts of writing that have been used for hundreds of years, even implicitly.

“There’s not always a very strict similarity [between texts] … There’s usually some form of connection where I can get the students to think in more sophisticated ways about the Swift songs … and apply it to something that they might not have the patience to sit and pay attention to.”

One of those people was Wu’s campaign manager, Wellesley alum Mary Lou Akai-Ferguson ’16. She described her role as being the “glue of the campaign,” which she found to be more effective than the traditional hierarchy of command for their grassroots approach.

“My main goal was connecting all the different teams and the work they were doing,” Akai-Ferguson said “Organizing didn’t have to check in with me or Michelle on every single decision … they all were empowered and leading their own charges.”

Akai-Ferguson had previously worked as a teacher and on Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign. For the latter, she held a few different roles, including serving as the organizing director of the Midwest and the national Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) outreach director. She credits her experience in these positions with teaching her some lessons she brought to Wu’s campaign.

“I had to learn … how to approach organizing in a place you’re not from. It’s really important to center the people who are living in the state, their perspective and their opinions,” Akai-Ferguson said. “You’re really just here to give them the tools to organize their own communities, to organize themselves.” 

It was during her work on Warren’s 2020 campaign that Akai-Ferguson first met Wu. They worked together remotely, and didn’t meet in person until the campaign had ended, where Akai-Ferguson mentioned that if Wu ever ran for mayor to give her a call. She got the call.

“I wasn’t planning on staying in politics, but it felt like such a good fit with Michelle. I really loved working with her,” Akai-Ferguson said. “We have very similar work styles and I appreciate her vision.”

The campaign team was largely made up of women, most of whom were women of color, which Akai-Ferguson credits as a “huge factor” in its success. 

“It felt like a continuation of my Wellesley experience … I felt like I could be wrong and I could ask questions and it was a place where that was ok and that was encouraged,” Akai-Ferguson said. 

The importance of community extended beyond those directly involved in the campaign itself. Wu’s experience in Boston politics, including serving seven years on the Boston City Council, meant Akai-Ferguson could work with more precise targeting throughout her campaign.

“She had a really in-depth knowledge of the city, down to the [street] corners … Because of that extremely hyper-local knowledge we were able to tailor our organizing to be extremely specific,” Akai-Ferguson said. “We knew what was important for different neighborhoods and we highlighted those parts of our platform based on the neighborhoods we were talking to.”

After many months of hard work organizing and motivating voters in the midst of a global pandemic, Akai-Ferguson remains excited to see a collective effort come to fruition under Mayor Wu’s leadership. 

“People who are from the city already know how much power there is in activism and community that’s been thriving in Boston for decades … And now we have a leader who really wants to put that to use,” she said.

Although she remains unsure if she wants to continue down the path of political organizing herself, Akai-Ferguson is encouraged by the thought of more young women entering politics, advising that although it may seem “really corny” there is value in “stay[ing] true to themselves.”

“Realize that’s actually power and it adds to the conversation, rather than us having to subtract from ourselves and become shells of white men,” Akai-Ferguson said. 

“Tilli aims to infuse the power of play and use the help of tech to create social emotional learning tools to help teachers and parents understand children’s pace of learning, keep track of the child’s strengths, weaknesses and areas left for improvement,” Thennakoon explained. 

Designed for teachers as well as parents, this semester-based system contains 12 modules covering a multitude of areas like bodies and boundaries, trust, and personal space to test five to 10 year olds’ empathy, critical thinking and metacognitive skills through games and classroom activity. Through a mobile app, children are then able to continue this learning at home with their parents’ involvement to allow a synchronized learning pattern between schools and homes. 

Although Tilli is presently successfully up and running, its establishment faced a fair share of pandemic-related difficulties. User testing had to be moved online just two months after it began, which meant a highly emotional and personal learning experience had to be adapted to be executed online. Teachers were placed in group training sessions and taught to adapt to the creative amendments made to Tilli’s games and stories. Nonetheless, Thennakoon states that the “physcological, emotional trauma and loss [caused to children during this time] is unimaginable.”

To make Tilli suitable for diverse audiences, a variety of social, economic and cultural backgrounds have been tested. Interestingly, Thennakoon noted that although both parents in South Asia and America were hesitant to engage in conversations regarding emotions with children, South Asian parents had less of an inclination to do so. This finding had to be factored in when activities and lessons were designed to make them more culturally relevant: language, symbols and stories were used to localize activities, while the packets were designed by adaptability of the school into low tech, high tech and medium tech to reach a larger economic scope of schools. 

Thennakoon also spoke extensively about how her experience at Wellesley contributed to the creation of Tilli. Thennakoon emphasized the power of the liberal arts education. 

“Having [a] liberal arts environment and being able to see problems with a 360 perspective was so important because there’s so many moving pieces. And I think Wellesley really helped with that thinking,” Thennakoon said. 

Thennakoon also mentioned that Tilli had its very first intern from Wellesley this wintersession. 

“Having people who are on the same wavelength as you [and] have the same work ethic, values and ideals as you was really nice. We would love to create a pipeline of having more Wellesley interns work with us,” Thennakoon said. 

Finally, Thennakoon was able to connect with Wellesley’s education department in order to access several resources. These resources helped her improve Tilli in several ways, as she took advice from a couple of Wellesley professors who are working in social and emotional learning. 

“Being able to have resources like professors and being able to come [to Wellesley] for advice and mentorship has been just phenomenal,” Thennakoon said.

When asked about her aspirations for Tilli in the near future, Thennakoon expressed her excitement to focus on school expansion and start a public launch with the schools that Tilli is working with. However, Thennakoon also expressed her hope for investors, which could greatly boost the operations, expansion and success of Tilli. 

“I think our whole focus this year is starting the public launch with the schools. [We are also] trying to figure out how we can bring investors who are vision aligned with us and are impact focused, so that we can have a more long term relationship with them. And so those will be our two biggest priorities for 2022,” Thennakoon said. 

With Tilli adopting innovative methods to address the crucial need for children’s social emotional learning today, we are all excited to see Tilli grow and expand under Thennakoon’s admirable passion and leadership.

“I applied to work at the admissions office as a first-year student because I had a lot of imposter syndrome, quite frankly,” she said. “As a low-income student of color, coming into this elite, prestigious predominantly white institution, I was really impacted very positively by the connections I had made with student ambassadors at the Office of Admission who looked like me and had similar experiences. I really wanted to be able to pay that forward.”

Praileau realized she wanted to work in higher education in her sophomore and junior year. As a sociology and education studies double major, she was especially interested in diversity, equity and inclusion work. She finds colleges fascinating because she sees them as “a microcosm of society.”

“I really loved being a soc[iology] major because it taught me to think critically about the structures at play that perpetuate existing inequalities,” she said. “Learning to apply that to specific ideas and entities that we encounter in our everyday lives … that really drew me to the education major.”

As an upperclassman, Praileau decided to apply to admissions jobs. She applied for positions at different colleges, but upon receiving a job offer from Wellesley, the idea of working at her own alma mater interested her most.

“I thought … ‘How cool would it be to be able to think about higher education administration … from the perspective of a recent alum, a recent alum of color, a low-income Black student,’” she said. 

Praileau emphasized how much the pandemic has influenced college admissions and her own life. As a low-income Wellesley student, studying remotely during the fall semester of her senior year was challenging. She found employment and housing much more uncertain after graduation due to the pandemic. However, she also thinks that COVID-19 restrictions have improved college admissions in some ways.

“[Admissions relies] so heavily on travel,” she said. “We’ve turned a lot to virtual programming … Because we’re able to leverage all these different new platforms, in a way it’s made Wellesley and our recruitment strategy more accessible to even more people, like people who are not necessarily able to afford coming to campus.”

In the future, Praileau hopes to continue recruiting low-income students and students of color such as herself. She would eventually like to pursue graduate studies in education. She also stressed the importance of not only attracting students from marginalized backgrounds but also retaining and supporting them once they arrive on campus.

“I think a lot of people assume that because I decided to stay at Wellesley, I had this absolutely perfect experience at Wellesley,” she said. “But the reality of the situation is that throughout my time at Wellesley I learned how to think critically about the institution and about college as a whole and about how schools can better support their most marginalized students.” 

Although she shared that the Office of Admission’s plans for the spring are changing every day due to the unpredictability of the pandemic, Praileau is committed to supporting low-income students, students of color and queer students no matter what. 

“I was also them,” she said. “Very recently.”

After years in the industry, she grew tired of its blatant misogyny and switched fields. As a Wellesley graduate, she had “no patience” for dealing with the tech boys’ club culture.

“I was just tired of fighting those battles … and there were opportunities for tech workers in journalism that didn’t exist as clearly when I got out of school,” she said. “It was nice to go to an office space where there were women at all, doing anything.”

This led her to her current position as a staff engineer for the Interactive News team at The Times, where she has worked for almost 10 years. The team, which deals with data and programming, helps create graphs and maps that track COVID-19 cases, the project for which they won the Pulitzer.

“We really understand the terabytes of data we get … and can analyze that correctly to say, ‘Yes, this is the methodology we can use to identify these trends,’” Fehr said.

Although she did not originally plan to work for a newspaper, she was part of The Wellesley News as an undergraduate. She was mostly involved in graphic design, the field she originally thought she wanted to go into after college, although she also wrote some articles. Similarly, at The Times she has occasionally written pieces that have accompanied the data she has worked on. 

“I definitely valued journalism from my experience with The News, which was the first place … I was exposed to most of its concepts,” she said.

Fehr is much happier with the gender dynamics at The Times, but she recognizes that the journalism field still has much more work to do in terms of equality of various kinds. As an engineer surrounded by writers, she has found that the newsroom has more women leaders in general than her data-driven team. Additionally, engineers in positions such as hers make much less than their counterparts doing the same work in more male-dominated startups and tech companies.

“I don’t think The Times or journalism can really pat themselves on the back about the representation of women on the technology side,” Fehr said. “It’s still a battle.”

Fehr also recognizes her privilege in coming from a wealthy background. While switching to a less financially lucrative career for the sake of happiness was risky, she had her family to fall back on if it did not work out.

“Choosing to be in technology in news is kind of saying, ‘I’m not going to be paid a Google-level salary for the work I’m doing even if the work could be similar,’” Fehr said. “Being able to decide that’s okay is either, you’re okay with the mission behind it because you really value journalism … or you are from a place of financial security where that is worthwhile. That is another bridge that the technology industry needs to understand, is shaping other industries because of competitive pay.”

Fehr has been working on the COVID tracking project since March 2020, virtually the start of the pandemic, and her work has gotten easier as the federal government has started releasing more data and vaccines have become available. After winning her Pulitzer, Fehr continues to work on the project with a smaller team. In the future, she hopes to potentially start a new project collecting data on how mask-wearing affects the yearly flu season. 

“COVID will still be around even in low-level exposure,” she said. “Could be we end up morphing to track [the flu] and COVID is just a subtype of the flu numbers or something … We need to get to this winter before we really find out what the cycle is going forward.”

Although Fehr feels honored to have won a Pulitzer, she noted that prior to the event, she hoped that all the finalists would tie. Fehr stressed the importance of every publication’s data contributions during the pandemic.

“I was really hoping [the Pulitzer board] would come up with, ‘Everyone did a public good because the government did such a poor job [tracking and reporting COVID numbers] … Journalism as a whole did a great job covering the government’s ass on this one,’” Fehr said.

She spoke to The News of her excitement and surprise at being nominated for and winning the Emmy. Barthwell described the experience as “pretty wild,” having never been nominated for “an award like that before.” 

“Even being nominated was such a tremendous honor and seeing the other shows that I was nominated with. I had a lot of friends that were also nominated that night,” she said. “Then when we actually won, I just remember feeling really, really happy and really, really excited. It was sort of this moment to kind of be onstage and show out, and have everyone who works at the show’s work celebrated and have my work celebrated.”

Looking back at her experience at Wellesley, Barthwell recalled her first visit and the certainty with which she envisioned herself as a Wellesley student. 

“I remember the first time that I stepped on the campus and I was like, ‘This is it. This is where I’m supposed to be,’” she said. “I really had that feeling from very early on, and I really loved being somewhere where it was about who we were as people, about our thoughts, about how we wanted to express ourselves. It felt [like] a very safe place to learn and explore and grow.” 

For Barthwell, the interconnectedness of the Wellesley network carries as much power today as it did years ago. 

“When I get to spend time with Wellesley friends, it feels like I’m speaking my first language again. It’s like that level of comfort and familiarity,” she said. 

Barthwell credits her confidence in her skills as an actress to her time as a member and co-president of Dead Serious, Wellesley’s comedy improv group.

 “When I was on Dead Serious, there was a sort of feeling that anyone can do anything,” Barthwell said, adding that feeling stuck with her even after graduation.“We were all women. So we’re gonna play everything, we’re gonna play the women’s part, we’re gonna play the men’s parts, we’re gonna play parts that aren’t defined, everyone can do anything.” 

She reflected on the confidence and values that Wellesley imbues in its students, both of which have played a significant role in her journey leading up to winning the Emmy.

“Wellesley taught me the importance of finding my voice, nurturing it and then sharing it and being comfortable sharing my voice and my stories,” Barthwell said. 

Barthwell also was a member of the faculty at Second City, where she began her career as a touring actor and improv comedian. She found that it made her think about improv with much more nuance. 

She found that teaching had a reciprocal effect on her, challenging her to think about the lessons she had learned in different ways. One of them was how to deal with the responsibility and expectations of representation as a Black woman.

“Everywhere that I go, I’m a Black woman, and there are times that I can speak on that or not speak on that. But regardless if I’m speaking on it or not, I come in and certain people have assumptions and stereotypes about me,” she said. “Mining on the specificity of my life and my experiences has allowed me to satisfy that need for representation while being true to myself.”

Being true to herself is crucial to Barthwell. But when she’s writing for someone else, she has to keep a different vocabulary and perspective in mind.

“The way that I would say something as a Black woman is using my grammar. If I’m writing for someone who’s a white man, or a black man, or a group of people, I may not be able to use my grammar but I can still use my vocabulary,” she said.

For Barthwell, the best way to learn what worked and what didn’t when performing was to keep practicing, no matter how basic or unconventional. 

“Figure out the thing that you want to do, and then find the free or cheap version to get you as many reps as possible,” she said. “Do you want to write a movie? We all have iPhones in our pockets. Can you shoot a bunch of short films with your friends with your iPhone as the camera?”

Barthwell also found that it was important to make sure her mental health did not rely solely on her creative outlet of performing.

“The thing that was really important for me was understanding that while performing and writing can feel therapeutic, it’s not a substitute for mental health,” she said. “I know my mental health would feel worse if I wasn’t performing, but that didn’t mean that performing was going to solve other mental health things that I’ve gone through and am still dealing with.”

Specifically for Wellesley students, her advice is to advocate for yourself.

“You’re at Wellesley,” Barthwell said. “You are better than any other white dude that is trying to do this, and he’s asking for more money, so you should ask for more money.”