Leap of Faith

Ilana Foggle ’21 spent her senior year at Oberlin 800 miles away, completing her politics and rhetoric coursework by Zoom "in a bubble…in this little apartment over someone's garage," while her father worked in a COVID unit at local hospitals. 

It was lonely, Foggle says, but she used the solitude to achieve a new, ambitious goal: being part of the journalism integrative concentration launched in fall 2020. With the help of John C. Reid Associate Professor of Writing and Communication and English Jan Cooper, who’s also chair of the communication studies program, Foggle leveraged her already-impressive résumé to join the first cohort of the concentration.

The coursework aligned well with her interests. As a Cole Scholar, Foggle had already worked in communications on Kamala Harris's first presidential campaign, as well as on three campaigns for challengers to Jim Jordan's Congressional seat in Ohio. The experiences illuminated a professional goal for Foggle that she's pursued ever since: becoming a speech writer. 

"I realized that that was where all of my interests and skills came together," she says. “[And] I had the support of so many professors who believed in me and wanted to know what I was interested in and wanted to help me get there. Even if there wasn't a class already, they were going to help me make that class. That's something that makes Oberlin stand out, and it's an experience I don't think I would have been able to have anywhere else."

For example, during her final year at Oberlin, Foggle suggested creating a speech writing practicum. Together with Cooper and Henry Hicks ’21, Foggle dissected political speeches to figure out what made these speeches tick. "There's not a lot of speech writing classes unless you're at a big school,” she explains. “And to have created that kind of opportunity at Oberlin was extraordinary, and I learned so much from it.”  Foggle credits the practicum with launching her career; in fact, she says she mentions the experience in “every job interview I've ever had.” 

One year after graduating from Oberlin, Foggle became the speechwriter for Illinois governor JB Pritzker. The day she started her job, Roe v. Wade's imminent overturn leaked to the press. "I'm there at 8 p.m. in my unfurnished Chicago apartment, and I'm thinking to myself, 'What would I want to hear from my governor?' And that is my ethos. I consider myself to be really audience-driven. If I'm the audience, what do I need to hear in this moment?"

Foggle carried this mindset with her when she left politics for the tech industry, where she now manages speech writing and communications for the Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at GitHub, an open-source developer platform. Her day-to-day role is still filled with storytelling—albeit a very different kind. 

"People want to feel connected. People want to feel seen, and they want to feel heard," Foggle says. "And a lot of what GitHub is doing right now is all about developer collaboration. 

“I was brought in to let people know that GitHub isn't just for the kid who studied Python every day and did AP Computer Science and then went and studied computer science in college," she adds. "This is now a field that is opening up to anyone who has a phone."

While she occasionally misses working in politics, Foggle finds translating technical terms and product features into compelling stories "a whole new challenge" that she enjoys. She even spends her time on the job learning to code with GitHub's AI tool, Copilot, continuing to expand her skills. "Every day is different," she says. "There's always something new to think about, to write about, to strategize on."

Foggle credits her experiences at Oberlin for giving her the tenacity to take leaps of faith into new disciplines and new industries. "I knew that I had the backing of my professors, and that it was okay to fail. That the worst thing I could do was reach out to a [political] campaign, and they'd say no," says Foggle. "I learned at Oberlin that I could fall and that I would still get up, and that's the lesson I will take with me for the rest of my life."

Kristen Evans is a culture writer and critic who has written for BuzzFeed, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, NYLON, and The New Republic. Learn more about the communication studies major at Oberlin.