As part of celebrating TiP@20, Program Director Mohamed Barrie and Development & Grants Specialist Katie Grischow initiated the Alumni Steering Committee. Some members of the committee chose to conduct interviews with each other to discuss how TiP continues to impact their lives.
Eddie Conley and Bendu David were TiP Reporters in 2019 and 2020. Eddie returned in 2022 to lead our podcasting group as a youth leader at the Summer Journalism Institute. Bendu David recently returned as a speaker at this year’s Pros&Conversation and was also a youth leader from 2023-2024. Read this interview between Bendu and Eddie to learn more about Eddie’s career and experiences in TiP.
Bendu David: So, Eddie, where are you now and what are you doing?
Eddie Conley: So, I still live in Boston. I’m originally from Hyde Park and I still live there. I currently work downtown in Boston City Hall. I work with my city counselor, Enrique Pepin. He’s the District Five city counselor in the office. I do constituent services, so if anyone in the district has a concern with the neighborhood, the city, I kind of take the lead on helping them figure out their problem. And I also do a little bit of policy work as well. So if we’re working on a city ordinance, a city program, things like that, I help out with those efforts as well.
Bendu David: Oh wow. That is genuinely so cool! Mohamed told me you had a really cool job.
Eddie Conley: Thank you. Yeah, I’m super fortunate, especially right out of college. It kind of fell in my lap too. So, I’m just, I’m extremely grateful for how 2024 has panned out for me.
Bendu David: That’s incredible. What was your career path post-TiP?
Eddie Conley: Yeah, so, you know, somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t really do any journalism after I finished TiP. SJI was my last time doing anything TiP-related, and that was the summer of 2020, so it was a completely virtual program. We did a good amount of writing and it was like different types of writing. It was more personal. And I didn’t really follow that into college. Like, I didn’t write for my college paper or anything like that.
I went into college studying political science, and I knew I really wanted to do something related to that. So, all the professional opportunities I took advantage of in college were kind of in service of figuring out what I wanted to do in the political science world. That culminated in an internship working in a city hall in Cranston, Rhode Island, in the fall of my senior year. The internship was a little bit boring. I was a pencil pusher for different schools in the area. It was a little boring, but I also felt a lot of satisfaction, like whenever someone would come in and they had a problem, and I was able to help them with the problem. I could point them in the right direction, help them fill out a form, or translate for someone who was lost and couldn’t speak English. All of that was rewarding. And that’s when I kind of figured out that I don’t really care where I am in the politics and government world as long as it’s helpful to someone.
Bendu David: Would you say there were any hard or soft skills from TiP that have translated into your life at all, post-high school and further into your career?
Eddie Conley: Yeah, definitely just writing in general is, you know, super difficult. I don’t think anyone will be surprised by that, but just knowing how to, I would say also, like in high school I was a little bit of a timid person and, you know, being forced to interview someone for like every article was really helpful in getting me comfortable with like, reaching out to a stranger, reaching out to someone who was in many cases more qualified than me and taking advantage of the information they were sharing. So I would say like TiP helped with like socializing.
And like, I guess, I guess you could consider writing a hard skill. But I guess in my line of work, since I’m not writing like every day and it’s not like a part of my job description or whatever, yeah, I guess we consider it a soft skill, but it’s super helpful to have like a backlog of different genres of writing that I’ve done, stuff like that.
Bendu David: And now I’m curious, how did you come to join? What’s your TiP origin story?
Eddie Conley: Yeah, so I really wanted a job in high school. My older sister was doing SuccessLink and I kind of expected that I would, you know, like when I was looking for a job that I would just kind of find something in SuccessLink like she did. She was doing a normal manual-labor summer job. Those jobs are fun because they’re very task-driven, but I knew that I wanted to use my brain a lot. And when I was looking through the jobs on SuccessLink, TiP stood out. It was completely different from anything else on the list of jobs. I applied, went to the interview, and everyone was super nice, and it seemed super cool. I had a feeling that I was going to enjoy it.
Bendu David: What would you say to a young person thinking about joining TiP?
Eddie Conley: I would say, give it a shot! I’ve met a lot of people through TiP and SJI and met students who did SJI, but didn’t come back to TiP during the school year. There were also a lot of people who did TIP for like one cycle during the school year and then they stopped. And I think there’s still a lot you can gain from doing it even for a short time. It was super instrumental in turning me into someone who cares about the world around them.
I would say, if I didn’t have Teens in Print, I don’t know if I would be where I am in terms of college and work, just because it taught me that, you know, telling stories is important, having ideas is important, standing up for something is important and those are things have kind of been like the cornerstone of who I am today, which is a lot to say, but it’s true!
Bendu David: My last question is, do you have any advice for current TiPsters?
Eddie Conley: Push yourself to do something you are not already familiar with. It’s oftentimes really scary to do that. But if you write an article about something that’s important, even if you don’t have a personal connection to the research, the people you’ll meet doing that article will become a huge benefit to you. So definitely make sure you’re branching out!
Bendu David: Do you have a favorite article of yours that you wrote or something you attended during Tip or SJI that you still think about from time to time?
Eddie Conley: Can I give two answers?
Bendu David: Of course!
Eddie Conley: So there was an article that I wrote in the fall of my senior year of high school. I wrote about how the map of the MBTA reinforces segregation in Boston. If you look at the map, you can see how Roxbury and West and South Dorchester are surrounded by the red and orange lines, but there’s nothing running through those communities. What they have instead is a ton of buses that smell really bad and pollute the neighborhoods. I got to interview a really cool guy for that, and I think about it a lot.
I think my favorite project that I worked on was the video article that I did in my first year of SJI about segregation in the city of Boston. I helped with filming, I wrote the script, and I did a lot of research. It was a story I found interesting, and it was something that I hadn’t done before. The article about the MBTA was very much like a follow-up to that video about segregation.
Bendu David: What year did you join TiP?
Eddie Conley: SJI was my first experience with TiP and that was the summer of 2019. So I started pretty late. I am still in touch with like two people from TiP and some of them were there way before me. In retrospect, I was only there for a short while. It still had a profound impact on me, which is nice.
Bendu David: It’s so interesting that you weren’t there for very long because I think of you as someone who has been at TiP forever.
Eddie Conley: Ha, thank you!