December 14, 2023 | PERSPECTIVES | By Isabella Ingersoll
Michael, an outgoing Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Catalyst, reflects on his upbringing, determination and his discovery of journalism.
“I’m from a really tiny town in Massachusetts: Dover, Mass. I feel like as most people who come from small towns do, I have a very love-hate relationship with my hometown. It gave me a lot of perspective. It’s not a very diverse town, it’s about 88-89% white. A lot of people who grew up in that area have parents who struck it big and either the financial realm or the commercial realm, or something like that. So, I grew up around a lot of people who very much took for granted kind of what opportunities and abilities they were given.
My mom’s an immigrant, her family immigrated from Russia when she was 14 years old. They came to the United States with just two suitcases; they had pretty much nothing. My grandparents, neither of them spoke English very well, if at all. But if you were to meet my mom today, you wouldn’t know that she wasn’t from the United States.
Growing up, my mom was always more of the disciplinarian of my parents. She really wanted to impress on my little sister and I that when you want something in life, you can’t just expect it to be given to you. You have to work hard, you have to really be determined to get these things. And ultimately, at the end of the day, people will see that hard work as a good thing.
I definitely think I got a lot of my work ethic from my mom. I consider myself to be someone who, when they set their sights on a goal, they’re very driven to accomplish it. And I think that sort of work ethic was instilled in me at a very early age from her.
My little sister Natalie and I were very close growing up. My mom had us taking outside math classes, not because we needed it but because she wanted us to get more advanced in that than the other kids. That’s something we did together like every Monday night for like five years for three hours a night. Ultimately those kinds of activities made us sometimes just a little bit separated from other people that we knew, so we just ended up spending a ton of time together. She was a great person to have growing up, just because she and I see the world in very similar ways. When we would go to Russian dinners and all my grandparents were speaking Russian and we didn’t know what was going on, we had the two of us to be able to be there with one another.
I do love spending time with other people. I consider myself to be friendly, but I definitely have a hard time making friends with people starting at nothing. I consider myself to have a good group of friends who I love spending time with and hanging out with. Maybe it’s just a part of growing up as an adult, but I would take that probably 10-times-out-of-10 over going to one of those frat parties with a sticky floor again. I’m very much a routine-oriented person. Me and my roommate and a few friends of ours, we all make dinner together once a week which is really fun. They have been making us watch ‘The Bachelor’ recently. I get a lot more out of those kinds of low-key things.
I wrote growing up. I wrote a lot of poetry. Coming from an immigrant family, I feel like sometimes they really impressed random, miscellaneous hobbies on my sister and I growing up that were nothing like what any other kid our age would ever do. One of those things ended up being that my grandmother really wanted me to write poetry. I would write things every so often for random family events. Like, when my grandparents celebrated their 50th anniversary, I wrote a short poem for them.
I never considered myself to be a great writer. I feel like I always consider myself to be more of a math-y,
STEM-minded person, and I always thought that to be mutually exclusive with writing. And then, senior year of high school, I was feeling nostalgic and ended up writing this poem about the point of life. My high school didn’t have a newspaper, but we did have a yearbook committee that would also do a random artistic magazine every so often. I submitted it and it made it in. I actually used that poem for my initial writing sample for The Catalyst.
In February of my freshman year, a friend of mine at the time, and now the President of Cutler Publications, Zeke Lloyd, interviewed me for a story. He was writing an article called, “Is Brady the GOAT?” and he knew I was a big Patriots fan, so he interviewed me for it.
Later that semester, this was probably like late March 2021, things really weren’t opening up yet with the Pandemic. Like people were just starting to get vaccinated but it still wasn’t a big thing. I’d been reading more and more of The Catalyst because I was so bored, and I was like, ‘maybe I should try writing.’
I wasn’t nervous because we weren’t doing print copies at that time. I don’t think I really understood how widespread The Catalyst was in the CC community. I had no experience with journalism, I had to watch YouTube videos about interviewing because I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t nervous per se, but I definitely didn’t think I was going to be there doing it for a while. I thought that at some point they were going to hire more writers and then be like, ‘All right, we don’t need you anymore.’
I love journalism because I wasn’t ever too enamored with writing growing up. There’s a lot of ways you can tell a story and I like journalism because it’s a little bit more analytical, maybe, than creative writing. There’s more of a process to it that I can go about with. It wasn’t really one true part that got me hooked but I think the ability to write with The Catalyst and choose what I want to invest my time in that I really enjoyed. Over time, I really began to feel like I owed a lot to the process of bringing these stories to light. I really gained a lot more of a fundamental sense of belonging with that.
I was Sports Editor for a year, and I loved it. But I really thought that we could do better as a paper than what we were doing. That was not a shot at the previous EIC leadership, but I had different ideas for the paper. That’s the point of the organization, right? It’s not supposed to be the same. It’s supposed to go in different directions. I felt like there were avenues that weren’t being explored that I really wanted to. The Catalyst has been around for about 55 years. Back in the ’80s it was supposedly an acclaimed organization. It definitely hurts a lot that we don’t know a lot about what organization was like, five to 10 years ago. I was like, ‘okay, I want to help build something back here.’
Ultimately, we’re just going to be a footnote in the history of the paper. Ultimately, we’re going to be forgotten, but I hope, even though we may be forgotten, the work that we did, you know, remains in the organization for the long term. I think that’s what my goal was.
The Catalyst has definitely changed me as a person. I came in and I was very much the kind of person who just put their all-in-all and all into everything. You know, keep going, keep going, keep going until it’s done, and then when it’s done, you move on to something else. That’s just not sustainable, both on the personal level and on the organizational level. It burns you out.
It’s still a process. I’m still figuring out how to balance all that. That endless drive to get things done is good, but you have to understand that you need to be able to control it. You know, you need to be able to understand when it’s a good time to keep going, when it’s a good time to pull back. There’s always going to be things that are left on the table that you wish you could have done. I had to learn how to be content with that.
I’m excited to see where the paper goes in the future. We got an email last weekend from a former editor of The Catalyst from 2012. He’s been receiving the paper through our off-campus distribution and loves it. That’s a really fun way to kind of bowtie the end of this tenure.
This paper, five years ago, was way different than the paper is now. And in five years, we’re not going to be able to recognize it. That’s so cool. I think that’s so neat.”