Everyone at Whitman has a story to tell how they got here and what happened once they did, and every story is different. This is Our Whitman, My Story.
My name is Kasey Moulton. I'm a senior history major with creative writing and film and media studies minors, and I'm from Nampa, Idaho.
I came to Whitman to debate. I debated for four years in high school and I really loved it and I wanted to keep debating. In college, I was drawn to the really generous financial aid that is offered to students on talent scholarships, in debate in forensics, so that was a really big incentive to me coming to Whitman and that's what's made my Whitman experience possible. I had a high school teacher who went to Whitman who graduated around 2014, and she also really encouraged me to apply.
I do parliamentary debate with the National Parliamentary Debate Association and the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence. It's a very technical type of debate. We talk really fast for fun and sometimes we don't debate about the topic, we debate about how well we're upholding the rules. We have 25 minutes to prepare before we start debating and we have to get started with whatever it is we have in those 25 minutes. So it's something different every time.
Over the last two years, I've been able to debate in a lot of places across the US. The first two years we were debating from home. Almost all of collegiate debate moved online for that period of time. But in the time since we've been able to go everywhere from Portland to Philadelphia and a lot of places in between. So this year alone we've been to Salt Lake City. Where else have we been? We've been to Salt Lake City and to San Diego and we've got trips to Salt Lake again and Arizona on the docket before the end of this year. We debate nationally, so we're competitive across the nation, which is a really fun thing to get to say.
I didn't come to Whitman intending to study history. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do when I came to Whitman at all, but I took a couple of classes in the department for distribution and I couldn't leave. I was really, really interested in the material we were covering and the broadness of what it means to study history. I think when we think about history as a subject, we think about dates and people and the big events that are usually covered in our history classes and not necessarily the minutiae. And I think the minutiae in history is what interests me. I want to know what's your average person doing, not what the big leaders are doing. And that's what drew me to history is the opportunity to get to do that work, to tell those stories. I think the overlap between history work and storytelling is really evidence, but it's not something that we get to talk about a lot. I think historians are storytellers and that's what drove me to it.
I've worked a lot with Professor Lerman here at Whitman. She taught the very first history class I ever took, and she's became my major advisor when I, and now she's advising my thesis. I've been really grateful for her patience with dealing with me. I love primary sources. I love looking for information and the kind of collection that you get to do with history. And I've been really grateful for the ways that she's let me pursue that interest in collecting, but also the, sit down and write something that I need to get told. More often than not. I'm in a really small cohort in the department this year. There's only six of us graduating with history degrees and we've been really lucky to get a lot of one-on-one attention that's really specific to what we're interested in studying, and we are just really lucky to get a lot of time to really get into what we're interested in.
The Whitman Wire is Whitman's student-run newspaper. We've been publishing almost continuously since 18 96, which makes us one of the oldest student organizations on campus. We predate the beginning of things like the Associated Students of Whitman College and a lot of other organizations on campus. The Whitman Wire is a weekly publication and we take the opportunity to showcase student work in terms of writing and reporting, but also photography and illustration in production and the kind of behind-the-scenes work that newspapers take. I've really enjoyed the ability to foreground some of that work as well. There's a lot of invisible labor that goes into newspapers that I really like getting to talk about.
At The Whitman Wire this year I've served as its editor-in-chief. It's been a big job to take on. So my role as editor-in-chief is to oversee all written content that is published in the newspaper. So I see articles when they come into draft. I work with editors on workshopping articles to make them the best they can be. I get to write and contribute and work with my team to publish other stories. I've done more writing as editor-in-chief than I did with any other positions I held with The Wire, and that was partly because my previous roles were in podcasting and production. So I didn't get very many opportunities to write, but I certainly got the opportunity to report.
A lot of my job is coordinating and talking with other people. It takes a whole lot of people to get a newspaper out and on a Tuesday morning when I'm sitting in my office getting pages cleared so they can go to the copy editors that day, I'm coordinating with a whole team of editors to ensure that things are in on time, that the production team knows what's ready, and the production team knows what needs time, so the copy editors know what articles they can look at. I work with the publisher and the managing editor if I think any more articles need time or attention. There's a lot of organizing people that comes with that job that I wasn't expecting.
So this year, the staff at The Whitman Wire, including both the editorial board and our hired staff writers and our staff team is almost 60 people. So our editorial board is made up of 15 students, and then we have about 45 people on staff. Everyone who works for The Whitman Wire is paid hourly for the work they do with The Wire that sets us apart from a lot of other college newspapers where their staffs are either paid with stipends or not paid at all. There's been a really drastic shift in how student journalists with The Wire have been paid in the time I've been at Whitman, and it's something that I think we, it's a change that needed to happen, and I'm really proud of the ways that The Wire community was able to rally when there were questions about how we were getting paid and the ways that the broader campus community rallied around us.
My very first semester with The Wire, I was a podcast reporter and I had the opportunity to speak to the man who was the contracted epidemiologist for the college and helps them make decisions about their COVID-19 response. It was a role that had been really thrown around. There was a really kind of vague, ambiguous, contracted epidemiologist that everyone was referring to. And getting the opportunity to talk to him and learn more about the response was really important. It really showed me... It was an opportunity to look behind the curtain in a lot of ways, and that really opened up my interest to talking about things that happened behind the scenes at the college that don't necessarily get foregrounded.
One of my favorite things to do on campus that it's a new favorite thing. It's something I've started doing this year is my friends and I love Trivia Night. We're very enthusiastic about Trivia Night once a month for a few hours, but it's so fun to see who shows up to Trivia Night and what we get to talk about. We do a lot of complaining, don't get me wrong, we all have a lot of questions about who general knowledge is actually general knowledge for. But it's a great break. It's so fun to see everyone show up for an event like that. And we get competitive. We get really competitive, and I think it scares people sometimes to see how competitive we get.
When I came to Whitman I really didn't know anyone at the college. There was one person I knew through debate because we debated in Idaho together at the same time, and so I was really grateful to have them to know I could go to one of my classes and see someone I knew, and I've made friends living in Stanton. One of my best friends now lived four doors down from me in Stanton, and we've been pretty inseparable ever since. Debate has been a really big way for me to make friends as well, just because we're often put in the same space for long periods of time together. But I would say that they're genuine friendships. They're not the kind of friendships you make by proximity. There are people I've met through debate who I really hope are my friends for the rest of my life.
A class I took for distribution that I wasn't really expecting to continue on with was English 150, so Introduction to Creative Writing. And I took it my sophomore year and I'm a creative writing minor now. I've taken almost all the classes that are offered for creative writing at Whitman, and that's really changed my trajectory as a student here. I really enjoy the opportunity to prioritize creative work, and I've been really appreciative of the ways that those classes have made that a priority.
Something about Whitman I've always appreciated is the way that as a student, you don't get pigeonholed into one place on campus. This is something we talk about a lot on the debate team, where we have debaters who also hold lots of other roles on campus. And that's one of the big reasons that I was drawn to Whitman in the first place is I knew I wanted to debate but I didn't want debate to be my whole life. And even though sometimes I make debate more of my life than I think my thesis advisor would like, I've still been encouraged to take on other roles on campus in addition to the ones I already carried.
And so that's something about Whitman that I've really appreciated is the way that I get to be well-rounded in ways that are more than just in the classroom. We're encouraged to take on leadership roles in lots of organizations and to take part in lots of things, whether those are clubs or events or activities or jobs or you pick. There's a lot of ways to be involved at Whitman, and there's a lot of ways to explore everything you're interested in, and there's the time and resources to make sure that you are able to.
I'm Kasey Moulton, and this has been Our Whitman, My Story. There are more episodes of Our Whitman, My Story available right now wherever you get your podcasts.
Music for this podcast provided by Big Joe, a band made up of Whitman students. For more information, go to Whitman.edu/stories.
