I’m a Visual Media Studies major going into my senior year of undergrad, so I’ll graduate this spring. I’ve taken a bunch of classes through the DeWitt Wallace center, and I spend a lot of time in the hallways of the Sanford building. The summer after my freshman year I interned with the 9th Street Journal and then the next year I went to the L.A. Times and now I’m interning at the Boston Globe. I’m at the Living/Arts desk, which is basically the lifestyle section. We write articles on food, music, movies, TV, etc. but there’s a lot of freedom, too. I get to do a half and half mix of pitching my own stories and then just doing assignments or working with editors to develop a story.
 
I worked with an editor named Brooke Hauser on the Ruth Handler story. I woke up the morning it came out in print to a text message from DeWitt Wallace Professor Bill Adair, who saw the online PDF version of the print edition before me. He sent it to me and he said this is so exciting! Your story is on the cover! I immediately sent it to my parents and friends and grabbed a dozen copies.
 
Before Barbie came out, Brooke realized that the archives of the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, were at this research library at Harvard called Schlesinger Library, which is a library specifically devoted to American women throughout history and preserving their papers, but Brooke said you really don’t know if there’s a story until you see what’s in the archive. And I said, I’m totally into this, let’s do it. I went to the archive on the first day and immediately started finding interesting things. I found exciting stuff about her children and sketches in her husband’s notebook for the first Barbie dolls, which was insane. It’s so funny because you go into this reading room in the library and it’s very quiet and everyone around you has these really old manuscripts doing research for theses, and I get my file boxes and it’s all bright pink, and I think oh boy, what does everyone else think I’m doing? Immediately after that, I called Brooke and said, there’s something to this. We ended up with 16 things, but I could write 30. – Nicole Kagan PPS‘24 #HumansofDukeSanford #Undergrad