By Marjorie-Sarah Atkinson
Staff Writer
Alison Berstein, longtime copy editor and staff writer for the Voice, will be graduating this month with a B.A. in journalism and French.
Ali has been working for the Voice since the second semester of her first year, which she calls “the best decision I ever made!”
Her favorite part of working on the Voice staff? “I love getting into debates with Katie about the placement of something, or a grammatical concern we both have, all the fond memories that we make…all the nerdy copy editor things.”
Hyphens are her biggest grammar pet peeve, as anyone regularly present in the Voice office on Tuesday nights could tell you. “You can change the meaning of something by one small line,” she said.
Her favorite classes at Simmons includes Studio 5, a communications workshop that involves working with real clients. “It was nice getting real-world experience, with real-world business and people,” she said.
She also loved her Contemporary Issues in France class, which included following the French governmental elections of 2012.
“We got to have a simulation election with that,” she said, smiling as she recalled the experience. If she could do one thing over, it would be going to Simmons again. “There’s so many classes that I still wanna take!”
She also said that she cherished the really close-knit community at Simmons, and the individual attention from teacher to student that came with the small class sizes. “I don’t want to use the cliché ‘everyone knows everyone’ but that’s really what it was.”
It was easy for her to think of her proudest accomplishment during her years at Simmons. “Coming back to it!” she answered, referring to last spring, during which she had to leave school three-quarters of the way through the semester due to back surgery that allowed her to walk without pain.
She also highlighted “the fact that I’m able to come back and have all these Tuesdays with you guys” as a major reason she’s grateful for her return.
As anyone who knows her can tell you, Ali has always been the number-one fan of puns. When people look back on her life, she said, the most important thing would be that she made people laugh. “Not just with my puns, but that’s most of the reason!”
It was decidedly difficult for her to pick her favorite pun when she was asked, but she was finally able to settle on one.
“What do you call a short fortune teller that escaped from prison? A small medium at large!” she said, adding that “a good pun is a rare medium well done.”
We’ll miss you, Ali! Best of luck in the future.
