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 Daily Week and does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
Daily alumni from the Class of 2025 are taking the world by storm, conquering journalism, public relations, politics, education and more.
Five of those graduates — Marlee Stout, former alumni liaison and associate editor; Aaron Gruen, former editor in chief; Nate Hall, former managing editor and executive arts editor; Henry Chandonnet, former managing editor and creator of the Tufts Daily Magazine; and Julia Carpi, former associate editor — spoke with the Daily about their first year postgraduation and the influence of their time at the Daily on their early careers.
Many of the alumni are still involved with journalism. Chandonnet is a staff reporter for Business Insider, mostly covering startups and artificial intelligence, while Carpi, who was also the executive audio editor, works as a freelance journalist and mostly covers education for the Cambridge Day.
“I’m writing one to two news stories a day,” Chandonnet said. “For the rest of the day, I have time to work on longer-form projects, mostly features, a little bit of investigations and looking for scoops.”
Other alumni, although not explicitly working in journalism, have applied similar skills to their current jobs. Gruen, who also served as executive news editor, works as a public relations intern for BerlinRosen.
“I think of PR as acting as an intermediary between companies or organizations and the public,” Gruen said. “That can mean anything from monitoring news to pitching events that an organization is taking part in and so I interact with journalism a lot on a daily basis.”
Stout works as a preschool teacher at Lesley Ellis School in Arlington, Mass., while Hall serves as a legislative aide for Massachusetts State Rep. Kenneth Gordon. Hall, who was also the executive fun and games editor, had a crossword published in The New York Times in January through a fellowship he completed with the outlet.
He encouraged current members of the Daily to get out of their comfort zones and try new things.
“I learned that everyone is coming into this with a different skill set, and we’re here to teach each other and to learn from each other,” Hall said. “Because of the encouragement I received from other members of the Daily, I was able to try all these things that you know weren’t even in my wheelhouse.”
Other former members, including Gruen, emphasized the value of networking as a means to help students determine the type of work they wish to pursue later in their lives.
“People are so eager to help out and to pay [it] forward,” Gruen said. “I think that even if you don’t have much interest or you haven’t necessarily considered the career of the person you’re networking with, you never know what they’ll teach you.”
They also spoke about the numerous real-world skills their time at the Daily provided them with.
“What’s kind of surprised me about postgrad is you’re doing so much of the fact-checking yourself as a writer,” Carpi said. “The Daily has an incredibly robust fact-checking system, … and so learning how to do that on an individual level was really helpful.”
“I also learned from the Daily the … ability to be a generalist and the ability to cross news functions,” Chandonnet said. “I started on arts, then I did a little bit of news reporting, then I was editing everything on [Managing Board], then I was editing long-form features for the magazine.”
Former members also contributed to a wide array of initiatives and reporting at the Daily, including special print editions, columns and investigations.
“I wrote a column called Center Stage, and I highlighted different performing arts groups around Tufts,” Hall said. “That was a really fun experience for me, because I got to learn about these groups, some of which I had never seen before.”
“I think that when you’re working at the Daily, you are exposed to so many different points of view and big personalities and challenges that it kind of forces you to grow a thick skin,” Gruen said. “Now I find that things that would have fazed me before the Daily don’t really make a big impression.”
Carpi also spoke about expanding the Daily and establishing more varied forms of media.
“I was really committed to making multimedia more established within the Daily,” Carpi said. “Video and audio were my little babies, and I found that throughout my time at Tufts, they became a lot more community-driven, a lot more integrated within the Daily’s culture as a whole, so I’m really proud of that.”
Apart from what they contributed to the Daily, many of the alumni said they missed what the Daily provided for them, saying that its social scene and connections made in the office were invaluable.
“Something about going to an office between 6 p.m. and as late as 4 a.m. definitely deprived me of sleep, but it also baked social time into my calendar,” Gruen said.
“It becomes sort of like a second home. You spend a lot of time in that office, and you make a lot of meaningful connections,” Hall said.
Others concurred, noting that the community the Daily fostered was something they all missed.
“The experience of being in the office every night and getting to chat with people and work together — that’s something that I would say is pretty unique to the Daily,” Hall said.“It’s not something that you find in a regular nine-to-five job.”
