Senior Spotlight: Tripod E-Board Members Share Paper Highlights and Post-Grad Plans

Nick Cimillo ’26

Executive Features Editor

Continuing from last week’s Tripod senior spotlight are the three seniors on the paper’s editorial board: Editor-in-Chief Olivia Silvey ‘25 and Managing Editors Julius “Jules” Bourbeau ‘25 and Cornelia Ehlebracht ‘25. In addition to their backgrounds before Trinity and some highlights during their undergraduate studies, these editors also spoke to how the Tripod has changed during their time leading it and their hopes for its future after they graduate.

Silvey is from St. Louis, Missouri, and when she was applying to college she wasn’t expecting to settle on a place like Trinity. “I didn’t think I would ever end up at a small school like this,” she said. “But my mom is really close to Professor Chambers in the political science department; they know each other from their first job. My mom was like, ‘Olivia, you should just apply to a small liberal arts school.’ And then I ended up getting in and getting a scholarship.” A sociology major and Italian studies minor, Silvey has also sustained her interest in journalism since her high school years. “I started writing the second I got on campus as a freshman,” she explained. “I was [the] opinion editor for my high school newspaper and I really liked it.” Despite her first Tripod meetings being online in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Silvey kept writing when, eventually, “meetings started to be in person again. That was really when [I realized] this is definitely something that I wanna stick with, that I’m really interested in and that I want to continue to build out.”

Among Silvey’s favorite projects for the Tripod are her articles covering Engineering Professor John Mertens’s ongoing lawsuit against Trinity and its Dean of Faculty, Sonia Cardenas. “That was so intense to cover,” she recalled, “and it was ground that I had never covered before: [there was] so much reading legal documents and dealing with really sensitive information that’s really impactful for our campus.” Another moment which Silvey cited as a “pivotal moment in my Trinity career” was last year’s encampment, so much so that it became the focus of her senior thesis. As her time on the Tripod wraps up, Silvey reflected on the changes that the paper has undergone: “[We] really [took] into consideration what we wanted the Tripod to be for this campus,” she said. “All stories really focused on capturing what’s going on on campus, not just for people reading it every Tuesday, but also for [readers in] the future.” Silvey also stressed the e-board’s efforts to make the Tripod more accessible: “People still don’t really know how easy it is to join the Tripod and how much of an impact it makes. Even if you just write one piece, it’s so easy [to] be published and get your ideas out there.” 

After spending the upcoming summer at home in Missouri, Silvey hopes to pursue a career in journalism, specifically one that would enable her to travel. “I’m so grateful for the Tripod and for everyone on it and for every one who puts in so much work all the time,” she concluded. “For people reading this, so much work goes into the Tripod every single week and editors do so much all the time.

“It’s kind of silly,” said Bourbeau when asked what led him to choose Trinity, “but I just looked up ‘best history schools in the US.’ And [Trinity] was one of the ones that came up, and it just fit a lot of my criteria.” But it wasn’t entirely what he expected, either: “I came in knowing that there are problems with every college … I came in [knowing that] they have a queer resource center. ‘It’s gonna be so friendly,’ [I thought]. And then I ended up getting in this huge conflict in my sophomore year with the flag stuff. It’s not exactly what I would have expected, but in some ways, it’s been better than what I expected. All the professors have been amazing. So I really can’t complain; I’m happy with my choice.”

Bourbeau is from Danvers, Massachusetts and is a history and women, gender, and sexuality double major — the former of which he is this year’s President’s Fellow. His story behind joining the Tripod stems from his involvement running a radio show on WRTC. “I had mentioned offhand in one of my classes that I had a radio show,” he said, “and one of my classmates was kind enough to listen to it. And I guess she thought I was good at talking about music, so she said, ‘How about you become an arts editor for the Tripod?’ So I wrote as an arts editor for about a year; I did a lot of writing, and I wrote whatever I wanted. It was a lot of fun.” Since becoming a managing editor, Bourbeau’s pieces have still been fairly arts-focused, including his favorite piece published last year about a Bermudian dance troupe’s performance in Austin Arts Center. “They ended up reposting the article on their local news blog,” he said. “They were reading this and they liked it enough and thought that I did a good enough job. You always have to be sensitive … of their culture because I’m just some random white guy. So to see them [think] it was good and want to share it with other people made me proud.”

Following graduation, Bourbeau plans on moving to the Boston area to live with his twin, and eventually hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in history. “I’m proud of how much the Tripod has changed in the past two years,” he concluded. “We really pushed for a Trinity focus for the past two years, and I think that has made things infinitely better. And we’ve gone the quality over quantity route … I’m really proud of everything that we’ve done. God knows it’s been hard … We had complaints, we’ve had everything under the sun. But we’ve managed to weather it all.”

Ehlebracht came to Trinity from Miami, Florida. “I was always interested in going somewhere different for college,” she said, “because I wanted to experience a different environment [with] four seasons and not always hot or raining like in Miami. I first heard about Trinity because one of my high school teachers is an alumna; she taught AP Psychology, and I’ve been really interested in psychology, and so I mainly came to Trinity because they have a really good psychology program.” Alongside her psychology major, Ehlebracht has a minor in Chinese language, which she has studied since seventh grade. She has been an active member of Trinity’s cheer team since she joined during her sophomore year, and she claims that being on the team “really opened me up to Trinity and meeting more people.”

Ehlebracht’s Tripod career also began her sophomore year with an article about the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and its impacts on LGBTQ+ fans. “I only wrote once that year,” she recalled. “But then the next year, I wanted to get more involved on campus and I decided to try [writing more] … I was really happy that I was asked to be a news editor over the winter break of my junior year; I was [then] working consistently every week as an editor. Then it continued from there and I [was] also asked to be a managing editor.” One of her favorite Tripod pieces, though, was her first article she wrote as a news editor about then-co-president of the Men of Color Alliance (MOCA), Xabian Alarcon ’25. “I think that [article] gives a good indication of the direction that we started going with the Tripod,” she said. “When I was a staff writer, we would turn in more articles that were a little bit all over the place. And then [the e-board] decided to go more in the direction of being more Trinity-focused and having more interviews. And I think that was a really good switch.”

As a current mentor and tutor for ConnectiKids, Ehlebracht is interested in going abroad and teaching children English following graduation, but not before taking some time for herself and enjoying her summer. “My core interests are really in helping people,” she said, “and I think that the biggest problem in our country right now are the literacy rates. And I think that giving people the tools to read and to communicate are the most important things for the future.” Reflecting on her Tripod career as a whole, Ehlebracht expressed that she is “thankful to have been a part of it … I really enjoyed it, and I feel like we’ve really made a community and a family.”