By: Amber W. (‘23)
Alumna Rebecca Pinwei Tseng (‘16) was the Editor in Chief of The Blue & Gold publication in the 2015-2016 school year. Rebecca recently graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied English Literature, Asian American Studies and Marketing. She is currently pursuing a Master in Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, where she studies Writing
Rebecca joined The Blue & Gold in freshman year through the encouragement of her advisor as she wanted to pursue writing. Starting out as a new student at TAS, Rebecca found interviewing people to be featured on the articles challenging. “My first interview was only supposed to last ten minutes, but I brought a list of 20 questions and additional conversation topics in case I blanked,” Rebecca said. “I also brought my friend to wait outside as emotional support.”
Even though she was initially very uncomfortable in interviewing people, Rebecca gradually became more comfortable interviewing as she began to rely less on her list of questions in order to interact with her interviewees and create insightful conversations. “Through interviews, I met amazing people at TAS that I otherwise would have never talked to,” Rebecca said. “Overall, joining Blue and Gold forced me to grow and find the confidence to take initiative, as well to look up from my own life and anxieties to see what I could learn, experience, and write!”
Throughout her years in the publication, Rebecca grew to love writing even more, especially feature articles, where she could focus on writing and learning about her featured interviewee and their achievements. She also learned how to grow as a leader and how to face obstacles, including time management.
As the Editor in Chief, Rebecca started a journalism club with a friend to allow students to have access to the experience of being in a publication without having to commit to the full time journalism class that is offered at TAS. Through her experience of being a leader in a publication, Rebecca went on to establish the first Asian American Literary Magazine at college.
Reflecting back on her days in the Blue & Gold, Rebecca reminices distribution day, where she could experience watching TAS community members immerse themselves in the paper and bonding with the class.
“Being Editor in Chief taught me to to chase the ideas that I think are worth chasing
and to persevere through the hard work of implementing them,” Rebecca said. “Learning to sift through ideas for gold nuggets has helped me immensely in my own writing, and managing a newspaper from idea stage to distribution has given me a lot of knowledge on the process of publication, which helped me when working at a book publishing company.”
