Oliver Hirshland: Blueprint for Action
When I reached out to alumni, however, I found there was a lot more interest in being a part of the project than I had initially expected. Thus, I decided to extend the timeline of my project, changing this project to focus more on the interviews and alumni outreach, but keeping my initial idea of creating a whole video to work on over the summer. So far I have interviewed 6 alumni: Ben Friedman and Dudley Ladd '66, Allen Barry '53, Liz Zimmerman Donaldson '96, Gilad Gordon '79, and Earl Leiken '64. This is only a snippet of all the people interested in being interviewed, so I plan on continuing my interviews and integrating interviews with current Key members as well.
What I intended to be just short interviews posing one or two questions turned into all 30+ minute interviews as alumni were very eager to share their experiences and memories and additionally, wanted to hear more about the current Key! These interviews were incredibly helpful for me as a lot of institutional memory and alumni connection had been lost since Covid and I learned quite a lot about Key's founding and evolution. From Allen describing the creation of Key to Liz's experience as Freshman Week Coordinator, it has been eye opening to see how Key has both changed immensely and stayed quite similar over time.
One thing that really stuck out to me was how every single person I have talked to recalled fondly how much they loved the camaraderie and friendships they made through the social aspects of Crimson Key. While people had glowing things to say about their tours and other shifts, it seemed like the friendships and the feeling of community is what really stuck with them and made their experiences so special. Additionally, it was very interesting to hear from Dudley about the importance of having a clear purpose and how staying in a niche role rather than continuously expanding can help maintain this clear purpose.
I have attached some short clips from the longer interviews below:
