Alone Together, Ep. 2 with Sabine Poux ’20

Laurie Patton:

I’m Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury, and professor of religion. In this special series, I’m checking in with our community to see how people are doing so that we might be alone, together.

Today I’m speaking with Sabine Poux, a senior at Middlebury, a poli sci major, and editor in chief of the Campus.

I want to start by, first of all, thanking you for coming on. You’re in the middle of doing online classes. You’re in the middle of figuring out what COVID-19 means in your own life. Thanks for being here. Well, how are you feeling? Personally, how are you?

Sabine Poux:

I think every couple of days, I feel very overwhelmed by what’s happening and I definitely miss my friends a ton. I’m very lucky to have a very great home situation. My younger brother is a first-year at a different college, but he’s also doing the whole online classes thing, so it kind of feels like high school, doing our homework in the kitchen late into the night. So that’s kind of reassuring in a way. I definitely mourn the end of my senior year at Middlebury, but I recognize the relative weight of what’s happened in my life. It has been pretty okay. I feel very fortunate in that regard.

Laurie Patton:

Yeah. Well, because you are a senior, you’ve lost the final quarter maybe of your senior year. You’ve had to forgo an in-person graduation on the day. We want to make sure that you guys have the in-person celebration that you deserve so that’s going to happen at some point next year. But how have you adjusted to the reality of those losses? What’s that been like for you when you first heard the news and then as you’ve been home re-experiencing high school, but four years later? That’s such a great image.

Sabine Poux:

I think it was definitely most jarring when we were first getting the news and first thinking about leaving school. That’s when all the seniors tried to pack in as much of a senior week as they could. I think since coming home, I don’t really know if I have quite come to terms with not having those things. But I do feel really grateful that in the time that we had, we were able to replicate some activities that gave us a little bit of closure.

Speaker 3:

(singing).

Sabine Poux:

For example, I’m in an a cappella group and we had an impromptu senior concert in Proctor Dining Hall in the middle of the week and each of the seniors sang their quintessential senior solo song.

Speaker 3:

(singing).

Sabine Poux:

Usually we plan that out for months and we have a ceremony after, in which we celebrate the seniors. While we didn’t get to do that part, just having the small concert even, as impromptu as it was, felt like a replica of what we would’ve been able to do with more time.

Those things, in the moment, I think made everything feel like it was coming to an end. Now that I’m here, it’s hard to grapple with these things from a place that I don’t associate with college very much at all. It’s like a pre-college place in a lot of ways.

Laurie Patton:

Are you back in your old room that you haven’t changed in its decorations since high school?

Sabine Poux:

Sure am. I have all my theater posters on the wall. My high school newspaper is pinned up on the wall. I haven’t changed—

Laurie Patton:

If you want a change, you could put some Middlebury swag up there.

Sabine Poux:

I actually have my letter of admission on my board, too. I know I should update it, but I guess that would be a good project to do with all this new downtime.

Laurie Patton:

You mentioned downtime, but I don’t believe you for a minute because you’re busy leading the Campus. Let me just pause to say that you’ve been a really awesome editor in chief to work with. You produced really good journalism this year. What’s it been like to adjust to working at home rather than in a newsroom?

Sabine Poux:

Everyone I’ve talked to has felt a collective loss of motivation. Some students feel very overwhelmed by the prospect of doing this from home and overwhelmed by balancing their online classes with the newspaper and have stepped back a little. But a lot of students see this as a productive channel into which they can focus their energy and feel like they’re doing something that is bigger than themselves. In the midst of sitting at home and feeling very disconnected to Middlebury in certain ways, this is a way to really feel connected and to feel like we’re doing something that is creative and productive for the community.

In terms of physically motivating ourselves to work from home, that can definitely be a challenge to not have our staff in the newsroom. We so value that face-to-face connection. But luckily it’s a very competent team. We work on Google documents, so there’s a lot of back and forth that happens. I think a lot of the in-person work we did was to construct the physical layout of the paper. We do a lot of editing remotely anyway. Now that we’re not doing the physical PDF version of the paper, we can repurpose some of that time that we would have otherwise been using to do that.

Laurie Patton:

Do you still have a daily routine as a newspaper and do you also have a daily routine as a student?

Sabine Poux:

I have had trouble getting up in the morning. My room is really cozy and it feels like a cave. I definitely start my day later than I would be starting it at Midd, which is a bit challenging. But once I’m up, I try to sit down at my kitchen table, I make breakfast, and I just answer a bunch of emails and do as much Campus as I can before doing a little prep for my classes.

We’re still rolling out coverage on Thursdays, so we’re trying to finish editing most pieces on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That process has been slightly delayed because of just people getting back into things, but we’re trying to still keep the week pretty front-loaded.

On the weekends, I’ve been trying to decompress. Also, I’ve been applying to jobs because all these jobs that I’ve been applying to have decided that they no longer want to hire people, so I’ve had to ramp up my job application efforts. That’s what my weekends look like.

But day to day, it’s actually been more challenging than I would have expected to balance online classes and other work. I think even if there’s not technically more work for the online classes, the activation energy that we need to put in to get to a place where we feel like we can do our best work, I just feel it’s just a little bit harder. Everything takes slightly longer. Even though I’m not walking to class, I’m walking from my bedroom to my kitchen, and then to the bathroom and back to the kitchen; the commute is so much shorter, but still somehow there’s this superfluous time on the edges of everything that adds up. There’s definitely these fringy times when I’m just confused about where the day has gone.

Laurie Patton:

You’re also doing this wonderful thing, which is the remote storytelling project. I thought it was really a wonderful idea for you to pursue this. Tell us a little more about it.

Sabine Poux:

I think one of the biggest questions we had when leaving campus is, how you’re going to recreate the sense of community you get on campus, kind of just like charting the day-to-day lives of people that is really intangible in a reporting sense.

We knew we wanted to do some kind of vignette-style series. Our digital director, Emilia Pollard, had brought over a couple ideas of what that would actually look like. I think at first she had recommended choosing six or so students who were going to be correspondents and report every week or every other week. Then we kind of thought it’d be cool to just see how many submissions we could get by opening it up to as many people as possible, and realizing that there are so many different stakeholders in the Middlebury community. We’ve gotten a ton of responses from alumni, which is super cool. The thing I love about that is just the geographical radius of the people that we’re able to reach out to has really expanded.

Laurie Patton:

Do you have any specific stories that you find particularly moving that you could share?

Sabine Poux:

Our first blast of stories is going to be all seniors. One of the seniors who wrote in talked about actually getting the virus on her way home and how that was an intense experience. A good friend of mine wrote this beautiful essay about how he’s found solace in bird-watching at home in a town that he never thought he’d ever return back to. We received a submission from an emergency room doctor who’s an alumna.

One of the questions we asked was what are you most afraid of at this time? Another one we asked is what makes you happy at this time? It’s been fun reading the answers to those questions especially and I think kind of realizing that a lot of the fears people have are universal, but that also that there’s some things that people are finding joy in. One of the seniors who contributed wrote she has found a lot of solace in the fact that her neighborhood is the same as it was when she was eight years old. I thought that was really cool. I get the sense people are very good about finding the positives.

Laurie Patton:

I love that. I think it’s very interesting people returning to landscapes of their childhood, for many, not all, students, and that itself being a very interesting moment to reconnect with something that you were in the midst of leaving. I’d also love to hear you talk as a journalist about the role that the Campus plays in our community and what’s important to report on right now.

Sabine Poux:

I feel like we’re very lucky because over the last couple of years, the amazing people I’ve worked under at the Campus have gotten the paper to a place where there’s a lot of trust from all corners of the College that I don’t know if it has always existed. I think it ebbs and flows. But right now I feel like the position we’re in allows us to do this remote work, and people want to contribute, and people are excited about the work we’re doing.

I think at different times since the announcement and since this COVID stuff has been happening, there are different points in which I see our role very differently. I think immediately following the announcement and in those first days and still now in a lot of ways, it feels like, first and foremost, we are getting information out to people, getting them the information that they need ASAP, and serving that information-providing role.

I think sometimes I see our role as a way to bring people together. We got a ton of op-eds about grading and heard people’s thoughts about the grading policies and tried to write a story synthesizing a lot of those arguments.

Then I also have been recently thinking about our role retroactively, thinking about what it’s going to be like to go through the archives in 10 years and wonder what was Middlebury College like when this was happening, because I’m obsessed with Special Collections. I could spend hours looking through old Campus articles and all the different publications they have on file there. But they have been posting a couple of stories that we posted back in 1918. Separately, I have a friend who’s looking into, for his first story that he’s writing, about how apparently in 1802, the College had one graduate and he couldn’t go to the ceremony because he was sick.

Going back into the archives has been so fun and it makes me think about when our paper becomes the archived paper. I think that’s very much on the forefront of our minds, and we write stories providing the context that feels very baseline for people. I have to remind myself that when people are reading these stories, which they hopefully will be years from now, that they’re going to need this context and that there are all sorts of pieces of the puzzle that when they put together, I hope they can get a full sense of what Middlebury was like during this thing. That’s also the impetus for this off-campus project is I think it’d be ingenuine to not try to touch upon some of the intangible ways people are feeling at this time.

Laurie Patton:

I completely identify with you as an archivist. I had a moment where I began to think, well, who was president in 1918? I found out it was John Martin Thomas. He was a very interesting kindred spirit because he was the first to live at 3 South as a president. He also had a degree in religious studies. He wrote. So it’s been a very interesting period of research for me as I think about the different moments of the College and moments of crisis in the College as well. I’m wondering, do you think that there will be a COVID legacy that will change the way you publish your paper?

Sabine Poux:

That’s an interesting question. I think at the beginning of this year, we had been toying around with the idea of shifting to online only. I personally love the print copy of the paper and I want to maintain the print version as long as we can. But I do think that there are some parts of doing online only or mostly online coverage that are really great that we’re seeing right now. I think that’s, like I said before, being able to whittle down the time we’re spending in design, which unfortunately often falls on some of our most competent editors, who should be editing stories, end up having to do a lot of nitty gritty layout work.

Also, just the speed at which we can upload online stories is really cool. When things are unfurling at rapid pace, the print version of the paper doesn’t always feel like the most relevant way to convey that information. But I think there are a lot of changes we’re going to probably see to our online coverage this semester. Our online team is really robust and has been working to improve our website and do cool things like get us on Apple News and figure out how to address some bugs on the site and get a better comment plug-in. I think those kinds of things, now that we’re only online, it’s going to become abundantly clear what our website could be at its best.

Laurie Patton:

I just want to say thank you for everything that you’re doing. You definitely didn’t sign up to be this kind of editor in this historical moment, but here you are, pivoting in all the ways that we need to. I want to thank you for helping the Campus be the place that keeps our community together in as many ways as it has and for all the storytelling that you’ve been doing and all the great journalism that you’ve done.

I will see you at your graduation.

Sabine Poux:

Yes. I’m so excited. Thank you so much. I know you guys have been… up to your eyeballs. It’s been really great.

Laurie Patton:

Okay. Take good care.