Senior Profile | Shawna Chen
On the Scene, Reporter’s Notepad in Hand Shawna Chen’s name has graced the bylines of countless articles in The Student. Behind the words lies her compassionate desire to amplify unheard stories. —Natalie De Rosa ’21 In my three years at The Student, I’ve had my fair share of intimidating interviews. On more than one occasion, I’ve frantically loitered the halls of Converse reminding myself to take a deep breath before walking into the office of an administrator with difficult questions in hand. And yet, I’ve never prepared for an interview more than this one with Shawna Chen ’20. The nerves didn’t come because I had a list of challenging, unsavory topics I wanted to bring to the fore — if anything, Chen and I joked about how redundant our conversation felt at times as I asked her questions about her hometown fully anticipating what she was going to say next. Rather, interviewing Chen felt like I was being put to the test, because everything I know about journalism I know from Chen. “It’s weird, huh?” Chen told me, acknowledging that she usually isn’t on this side of the interview. While some may not know her face, nearly everyone on campus recognizes her name, which has sat comfortably in the byline of countless articles in The Student. I’ve seen her in action, scribbling notes with a Muji pen into her reporter’s notepad, furrowing her eyebrows while very meticulously editing the week’s articles. It’s rare to see someone exhibit so much passion toward a job as laborious as that of a journalist, but Chen does. She strives to get the facts straight through whatever means it takes, all the while handling her interviewees’ stories with tremendous stew-
ardship. With someone as skilled and ambitious as Chen, it’s not hard to imagine why presenting my questions to her for this profile induced some anxiety. I’ve been lucky enough to get to know the person behind the print, to both see Chen in her element as a journalist and build a friendship that has impacted me in more ways than she knows. There’s more to Chen than the words she spills onto a page: She knows exactly where to get the best boba; she can guess anyone’s Myers Briggs personality type after knowing them for 15 minutes; she is quick to compliment. Undergirding all of what Chen does, regardless of whether it’s in print or not, is a profound sense of compassion.
Between Shanghai and Silicon Valley Though Chen was born in Cupertino, California, the Silicon Valley neighborhood would not be her permanent home, with her family moving to Shanghai when she was four. Her early memories in China are colored with vignettes of her rollerblading with her cousins and drinking milk tea. “I swear, I fell in love with boba,” Chen said. Chen would not stay in Shanghai, either, and her family moved back to the Bay Area again when she was 10, this time permanently settling in Palo Alto. Living in a familiar place should have proven less difficult, but the cultural differences between Shanghai and the bay grew starkly apparent to Chen. “I remember coming back [to
8 | The Amherst Student | May 31, 2020
the U.S.] so proud of being Chinese,” Chen said. “Within a year, it was all stripped away from me because it became clear to me somehow — not explicitly, but somehow — that all of that was considered weird or inferior.” Coming of age in the heart of the tech industry further illuminated a new cultural dimension Chen did not encounter to the same extent in Shanghai: the work-centered, perfectionist atmosphere that defines Palo Alto. With Stanford on one end of town and a plethora of tech giants mere miles away, this micro-culture didn’t come as a shock to Chen. Among her classmates and neighbors going into high school included the children of Stanford professors, Yahoo executives and the cofounder of eBay (Steve Jobs’s daughter attended the rival high school, she was quick to add). “We were really proud to be Titans, and there was a lot of school spirit,” Chen said about her alma mater Henry M. Gunn High School. “But it was a hard environment.” Chen was not the only one to sense the deep-seated perfectionism at her high school and in Palo Alto at large: the Silicon Valley town would soon become infamous for its suicide clusters, with three of her Gunn classmates and one student at the other high school taking their lives in her junior year, including one friend. “It really fundamentally changed me as a person, grieving and trying to learn how to grieve and not really having the
Photo courtesy of Audrey Cheng ’20
Chen’s love for journalism began at her high school paper, where she began to see the craft as a way to combat inequity. space to. Because, you know, junior year meant getting your SATs ready and your subject tests and your grades and your GPA, and you’re about to apply for college. You don’t have time to mourn,” she said. It was in this context that Chen made her college decision, choosing between Amherst, Cornell and Northwestern. When she visited Amherst the classes she attended were intellectually stimulating to her. “I never thought I could question the fundamentals of things,” Chen said about her visit. Months later, Chen would head to the east coast to begin her first year at Amherst, her mother crying in the bushes near Memorial Field as Chen went off with her orientation group.
All the News That’s Fit to Print In her first year at Amherst, Chen admitted that she viewed her experience through rose-tinted glasses. Her hallmates on the second floor of James cultivated a vibrant community to come home to at the end of each day. Chen kept herself busy as she immersed herself as
a member of the Amherst Christian Fellowship, Amherst Mixed Martial Arts and the orchestra as a violin player, alongside working on the Amherst Says Instagram page with the Office of Communications. It was also in that first semester that Chen, who had applied to the college as a psychology major, realized that she “wasn’t kidding anyone, that English was my top love” after taking a class with Henry S. Poler ’59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English Geoffrey Sanborn, who “really made the difference in opening my eyes to the kinds of literary experience you can have.” Perhaps the most notable part of her first year was joining The Student, first as a news writer before moving into the role of managing news editor a mere month into the fall semester. Chen didn’t always intend to be a journalist. When registering for classes during her freshman year of high school, she was dismayed at the lack of creative writing courses offered. As a compromise, her mother suggested that she take journalism courses instead, unknowingly sowing the seeds for her infatuation with the field.
