Editor’s note: The Daily’s editorial department acknowledges that this article is premised on a conflict of interest. This article is a special feature for Commencement 2025 that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
“This is going to be probably the most unglamorous answer I give you out of all of them,” graduating senior Merry Jiao said when asked about how she’s feeling about applying for jobs this spring.
Jiao, a former managing editor, former executive copy editor and current columnist for the Daily, has had to make a huge change when it comes to her career path. An international relations major, she came into this semester with a concrete plan of taking the Foreign Service Officer Test and applying for federal jobs. These plans were dashed when, due to the current Trump administration, federal hiring was frozen, and a week before she planned to take it, the test was canceled indefinitely.
“All those plans went out the window,” Jiao said. “So you got to pivot, right?”
However, this is hardly the first pivot she’s had to make. Following her first year of college, she transferred to Tufts from the University of California, San Diego.
“It’s lovely spending time in 70-degree weather all the time and running up and down the beach and joining all the music groups and being in tech rehearsals for 11 hours a day,” Jiao said. “But sometimes you’re like, let’s see if we can go higher.”
Jiao spoke about the difficulty of the transfer process. “You feel like you’re doing college twice, and it doesn’t feel very glamorous. You don’t feel like you’re being rewarded for doing something really hard.”
That first semester at Tufts, Jiao joined a handful of clubs, including the Daily. She said that signing up for copy editing shifts felt like an easy way to get involved.
“In the beginning, I was in [the Daily office] every other Tuesday for an hour and a half. It wasn’t a huge commitment. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere. It was just like, this is a cool place where I think I could learn a little bit of stuff, and I’m getting a little bit involved.”
At the end of the semester, she was asked by the then-executive copy editors, now graduating senior Rachel Liu and Chris Vergos (LA’24), to apply for the position, a move she was not expecting.
“It’s not about your expertise or your skill set or your prior experience with journalism — what they’re looking for is consistency and that you’re always saying yes.”
From there, she started to take a path further into the Daily, applying for the managing board and eventually becoming managing editor her junior spring.
“You’re like, wait, they’re doing late nights. I’m also doing late nights. And also, we’re working on the same articles together,” Jiao said, describing the thought process. “Oh, wait, I could do that. I can be on [the managing board].”
Another significant turn followed her sophomore year, after a rejection from the Tisch Summer Fellows. After receiving a newsletter about unfilled summer positions, one unexpected position caught her eye: a legislative fellowship for NASA. Not long after sending in an application, she received an acceptance while sitting in class.
“I was like, ‘My future’s going to change,’” she said. “‘I get to put this on my resume forever.’”
The job presented numerous opportunities to experience the day-to-day meetings and functioning of agencies on Capitol Hill.
“What was really cool about the whole internship was seeing how policy gets pushed through Congress,” Jiao said. “There was no pressure on me to make sure that [any] piece of legislation passed. … They were just kind of like, ‘Hey, Merry, you want to come along to this?’”
More recently, after finishing her semester on the managing board, Jiao took a step in a different direction and wrote her first-ever article for the Daily. Inspired by her friend and former executive copy editor Natalie Bricker (LA’24), as well as her love of books, Jiao decided to write a book review column while abroad in London. She described this as a departure from her mindset from when she first got to Tufts.
“I saw the application for columnists coming out [my] first semester at the Daily [and thought,] who has this much to say about a certain topic? … There’s no way that what I say is that valuable that I would want to publish six times a semester on this topic.” Jiao said. “Then coming out on the other side of [managing] board, [it’s] like, ‘Oh no, like everyone’s just goofing off, it’s just a good time.’”
Now, as she reflects on her time at Tufts and taking the next steps in her life, she’s prepared to take on whatever unexpected challenges come her way.
“I feel like that’s the general message, is that you just take things slow, and things will work out. I say that, and I don’t really believe it, but also, looking back at these past four years, it has worked out.”
