Don't torture yourself, Gomez. That's my job.

"I learned how to listen. Don’t try to out-talk everybody around you. Keep your mouth closed and let them talk. They’ll tell you what they want you to know, and if you can get them to keep on talking they’ll tell you things they don’t want you to know. That’s one way you conduct your intelligence gathering: You want to make people talk. And you have to be quiet and listen. And the more you do it the better you become at it."

"I am tired. These people make me feel I have a hole in the middle of me."

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When I was on the admissions committee last year, I looked at a lot of your applications essays, and it made me happy to read them: You wrote about the power of storytelling, the drive to find things out, the passion to shed light. “This is a job that constantly rewards curiosity,” I read in somebody’s Statement of Purpose, and I thought: Yes, that’s the wonder of it, that’s why it’s such a glorious line of work. You have a head full of questions, as most thoughtful people do, but you’re the one who gets to barge out there to try to answer them. You have a lifetime license to learn — to pick up the telephone, or knock on the door, and say: Tell me about this. Explain this to me. Help me get it right.

Exactly how you get it right, in the big unruly sense — how you go about your reporting, how much you disrupt people’s privacy, how you weigh the harms and benefits of publishing or not publishing — those are the honorable arguments well take on together in our Law and Ethics class this spring. But whether you get it right, and do it your own hardworking self — that’s not actually up for debate.

You have to want to get it right. Getting it right has to matter to you so much that if you’re going to lie awake at night worrying (which we do a lot, in this line of work, so you might as well get used to it now), getting it right is what you worry about. Am I sure of my reporting? Could I have misinterpreted what that guy said? Did I check the names, the statistics, the background section with all the dates in it? These are your 2:00-in-the-morning questions, because if this is what you want to do for a living, all you’re really going to produce, when you think about it, are sentences-sentences that are going to be read or listened to by people who don’t know you and are trying to trust you anyway.

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