Amanda Hsu: The Rubicon usually always writes a story covering new faculty members in the first cycle of the new school year. This year, we decided to present this introduction a little differently, adopting the format of the game Two Truths and a Lie. I’m Amanda Hsu, and in this podcast episode, I talked to Sonia Kharbanda, opinions editor for The Rubicon, who was in charge of writing this new faculty feature.

Amanda Hsu: How did you or the feature editors come up with this story idea and format?

Sonia Kharbanda: They just put it in the brainstorming document. I’m not sure who suggested it, but I was thinking something similar, like, maybe, like, you know, Vogue does like 73 questions with a celebrity. I was thinking something like that could be cool, but that would have been way too many questions, but something that’s more interactive and less like a typical story, because, with the amount of new teachers that we have, it would be kind of like, hard to read a story and, like, connect all this information, so it’s a lot easier to have kind of like an infographic format.

Amanda Hsu: How did you plan out your interviews?

Sonia Kharbanda: I believe there’s eight new teachers I interviewed. Basically, I did it over like, a week and a half. So I emailed the first four, and I scheduled the first four for that week and then the next four for, like, the second part of the week. Most of them I told in advance it was Two Truths and a Lie. Because the first time I did an interview, I didn’t tell the interviewee that it was Two Truths and a Lie, so she had to think of them on the spot. So after that, I learned I should tell them in advance, because it’s kind of hard to come up with them when I’m just standing there watching them. Yeah, well, I only had one of them, like only one of the teachers I interviewed is actively my teacher, so I asked him in person, but I the rest of them, I just emailed because I didn’t know who most of them were.

Amanda Hsu: Who did you end up interviewing?

Sonia Kharbanda: Ms. Ward, the counselors Mr. Turnbloom and Miss Roney, Ms. Elfenbein Director of College Counseling, Ms. Bice, Mr. Kinseth, the new math teachers. Ms. Joyce is a new English teacher, but she kind of already worked here, and Ms. Tsui the library assistant, yeah, that’s all eight.

Amanda Hsu: What were some of your favorite answers?

Sonia Kharbanda: Ms. Bice said that she intentionally ran a red light because, like, she had been waiting for so long, and it was like, like, first a cop went through the red light, because it would have been like, 10 minutes, and they were just waiting for it to turn and it was broken, and so then she went after him, and she was like, I guess I’ll just do this. So I thought that was, like, an interesting story, and I would have thought she was in the wrong, but she wasn’t. And then also, Mr. Kinzeth had a story about… he said he couldn’t talk until he was four, but really he couldn’t talk until he was three, or something like that. But he was, like, physically tongue-tied, like there was something wrong with his tongue, and then he had to get, like, a procedure, and when that physical thing was removed, then he could talk, yeah.

Amanda Hsu: Are you putting your own answers in the published version of this story?

Sonia Kharbanda: I’m not putting my own answers because I was really bad at it, but I did in every interview. I would ask them for theirs, and then I would do mine, and they could guess mine, because I thought it was kind of awkward to just ask them for two truths and a lie and not do it back, and it seemed more fun to participate. Almost all of them were able to guess my lie, and I was not very good at guessing their lie. So I learned I’m not very good at this game.

Amanda Hsu: What were some of your own answers?

Sonia Kharbanda: I kind of had, like, some go-tos, like, I usually would do something about, like, I have two family members at the school, like two cousins, or I would say, like, I have an older brother, like, some kind of something about like, my family. A lot of times I would say everyone in my family was born in a different state, which is true, and also not like that uncommon. I guess sometimes I would talk about pets, so I kind of was always in the same genre. And then I started saying I was chronically late, which was true. Anyway, so I wasn’t very good at that game.

Amanda Hsu: What are some of the options you would give someone? For example, if we played right now, what would you say?

Sonia Kharbanda: Okay, three? Well, I already kind of told you which ones are the lies. Okay, I’m gonna come up with three that I didn’t tell you.

Amanda Hsu: Okay.

Sonia Kharbanda: Okay, I’m chronically late, everyone in my family was born in a different state, and I have three family members at the school.

Amanda Hsu: Is it the three family members?

Sonia Kharbanda: It is, that’s the lie, yeah.

Amanda Hsu: Yes, okay.

Sonia Kharbanda: But yeah, I have two family members that go to the school my brother graduated.

Amanda Hsu: What kind of images did you get for your story?

Sonia Kharbanda: In hindsight, maybe this wasn’t great, but I just got headshots of all of them against a white wall. I haven’t made the infographic yet, but I want to do something that’s sort of like a quiz, because I want, like, students to be able to have the same like, fun of the game that I had, where you actually get to guess, and I don’t want to, like, just tell them what it was right away. So I’m thinking, like, I’ll put their headshots, and then I’ll put their two truths and a lie and then I’ll make a little like answer box at the bottom, or something like that. And I wanna do something with, like, fun colors so, like, people really like it stands out to them on the page.

Amanda Hsu: How much space will your story occupy in the feature section?

Sonia Kharbanda: I’m actually not sure who else is writing for feature, but I feel like it should be, like, a quarter of the two pages, or half of one page.

Amanda Hsu: Would you suggest this format for next year or for other stories? Would a different format be better?

Sonia Kharbanda: I think that this format was good if you’re going to interview this many people, because, like, interviewing eight people, if I were to have, like, an in-depth interview with them, that would have taken so much time, and it would have been a lot harder to schedule, and also would have been hard to piece together, because I think that a lot of this, like kind of new faculty story, would be asking very basic questions, like, why’d you choose SPA? What drew you to SPA? Where did you work before this? Like, what do you enjoy about teaching? And it would be kind of like just comparing their answers. And it wouldn’t be like a very interesting story, it would just be like a bunch of facts that, like, don’t really go together, you know what I mean? So I feel like for a story like this, it’s more fun to do something engaging that will teach you something about new people that you wouldn’t already know and that they wouldn’t like probably write about themselves for, like, a profile, or that they wouldn’t tell you on the first day of class. So I think that’s cool, but maybe we switch it up and don’t teach your truth and a lie next year but we do like, like some amount of questions with this person or some other like game,

Amanda Hsu: The Rubicon hopes to continue providing entertaining and engaging content. Thank you for listening to this podcast episode. We will be back next month with more behind-the-scenes stories from the staff. See you next time.