Senior Profile | Emma Swislow
Taking on All The World’s Weird and Wonderful Emma Swislow spent her time at Amherst leading The Student, writing an English thesis and communicating her excitement for the nuance in her surroundings. —Olivia Gieger ’21 My earliest memory of Emma Swislow ’20 comes from before I even knew who she was. Early in my first year at Amherst — her sophomore year — we both frequented the first floor of the library, where we’d sit at the wheeled tables near the periodicals. Emma would sit behind her brightly stickered laptop, laughingly commanding a table full of 19-year-old college boys. As I sat tables over, I was so captivated because it was everything I so badly wanted to find for myself. She seemed so cool and comfortable in herself, which could not be further from the adjectives used to describe me that September of my first year. She reigned over this table with such certainty, seemingly unbothered by the boyish taunts and teasing of her tablemates. Who was she, confident in her own niche nerdiness? And how could I be like her too? Come spring, Emma and I both found ourselves in the basement office of The Student — she was a fresh news editor and I was on arts & living. Still insecure and uncertain, I saw Emma as someone who I could easily recognize myself in. We were both literary-minded, dabbling in the ultimate frisbee team (which neither of us really stuck to, ultimately) and interested in natural sciences (she as a geology student and I as an environmental studies major). I looked up to her as a role model then, and I still do. Three years later, as I sat down to write this profile from the suburban house where I grew up, I wondered what those versions of ourselves would think of us now as we’ve both grown and taken the helm of something far greater than
a table full of sophomore boys. Life On and Off the Page Swislow’s tenure on the newspaper defines her time at Amherst. Starting off as a news writer in her first year, she stepped into the role of news editor in the spring of 2018 as a sophomore and then served as the editor-in-chief, from the fall of 2018 to the fall of 2019. The road of editorship has been rewarding, but certainly rocky, Swislow says. Her introduction to The Student was through writing on fairly light topics like our Fresh Faculty and Thoughts on Theses series; her introduction to news editorship was a little less rosy. Specifically, the campus faced two student deaths only weeks apart, and Swislow grappled with how to cover that in a newspaper, on a campus where everyone seems to know everyone else. “I think both of those deaths were felt really, really strongly by the entire community, and figuring out how to cover them in a way that both respected the privacy of the students and the families but also provided information that was important and impactful to the community was something that taught me a lot,” she said. “It was tough. I mean, I wrote the article about one of the memorial services, and I have to admit I was crying through the entire thing because it was just so emotional.” And it did not get easier going forward. The next year, Swislow and her fellow editor-in-chief Shawna Chen ’20 oversaw the coverage of the controversy surrounding the college’s Common Language Document, sexist and transphobic remarks about it in the Amherst
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Republicans GroupMe, the visit of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, anti-semetic harassment by men’s lacrosse players, Chen’s series on tenure for faculty of color and the report of some faculty opposition to an affordable housing development in town. Each came with its own fresh batch of ethical questions. It’s hard, being at the head of a newspaper and knowing that you can’t pass off tricky choices onto anyone else higher up the ladder. Swislow looked to her parents, who both led careers in journalism at the Chicago Tribune for some answers, but the workings of a big city paper are not a one-for-one match for the ethical questions that plague a tiny college newspaper. Often, it comes down to what feels right. “I have my gut instincts,” said Swislow. “You can come to a pretty solid conclusion on what is mostly right and what is mostly wrong. You know, nothing is ever black and white.” (Not even newspapers...) But, for all these challenges, Chen was in it right alongside Swislow. “I could not imagine being editor-in-chief with anyone else really,” Swislow said. The two have known each other since before coming to Amherst — they met at a journalism summer program run out of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism (“We’ve known each other since we were 16/17… Oh my god,” she laughed). When Emma arrived as a student on campus, Shawna was the only other person she knew. Chen had joined the paper as a news editor a little bit before Swislow, and the two held the po-
Photo courtesy of Emma Swislow ‘20
Swislow approaches all she does with a quiet appreciation to absorb all that she can about the topic at hand. sition side by side for most of their sophomore year. “We’ve basically been working together intensively since the beginning of sophomore year, which is a really long time,” she said. “It was really, really wonderful to sort of have that person throughout basically my entire time in the newspaper. It’s so important to just have someone who understood what it was like. My friends are amazing, but also, they don’t always get it. Newspaper can be really intense; it can be really draining; it can be really rewarding. And so having someone else that got it was really, really important.” Chen agreed: “Because of newspaper, there’s a dynamic of partnership that really played a big role in my life at Amherst,” she said. “Having that partnership, having that support and knowing that she had my back no matter what was really important to me and helped me get through a lot, not just with newspaper but personal matters too.” “We work really well together,” Swislow added. The two have different approaches to journalism that made them complement each
other so well . “It was so easy with her. The type of partnership and rapport I had with her was so easy. I keep returning to the word easy but I think just because it was like two pieces of a puzzle, as cheesy as that is. We just fit really well,” Shawna said. Their relationship, to me, stands out about what is so uniquely special about working at The Student: It breeds this deep intimacy and closeness among people whose lives overlap only in this one intense project. The friendships that come out of newspaper are ones that would not exist in any other context and operate unlike any relationships I’ve had, in the most wonderful way. “One of the main things that I’ve just loved about being on the newspaper were production nights. I love when everyone is in the office. Sometimes people talk too much, myself included, but it’s just so much fun to all be together, working on creating that week’s issue,” Swislow said. “I love being with the staff of the paper. I mean, I just loved everybody who was on the staff during my time as ed-
