Where Oberlin Meets Art and Investigative Podcasting

In her very first semester at Oberlin College, Sarah Dalgleish ’20 camped out in the courtyard of the Allen Art Museum for art rental. It’s an experience she wrote about as a student, which now seems like foreshadowing, considering that she currently merges her writing and investigation skills with her love of art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a development assistant for research. 

“When I walk through the Met now and I see a Miró or a Picasso, I always think about how when I was a student I had art by these painters on my dorm room wall,” Dalgleish says, “It’s still unbelievable to me.” 

In her second year, Dalgleish took the intro to the English major with Donald R. Longman Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Hyman. “The way that she taught English and the way that she taught the value of studying literature was completely revolutionary to me,” Dalgleish says. The past felt emotionally relevant to the present, a feeling of connection she also felt in her Rhetoric and Social Protest class with Assistant Professor of Writing and Communication Cortney Smith. 

Dalgleish became both a course writing associate and a writing associate, working collaboratively with other students on their assignments. “It opened up this piece of my brain that I didn't know I had, and that I loved,” she says. “It was super influential on the rest of my career. All the writing and journalism projects I've done since, as well as my current job, are all very collaborative.”

At Oberlin she co-produced The Weekly, a news show on WOBC, as well as an oral history podcast with residents at Kendal at Oberlin. “It was the first time I was really interviewing people and asking them to share their stories,” Dalgleish says. “That was an incredible experience.” Her narrative documentary radio led her to study at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, which teaches narrative documentary radio, and launched her career. 

From there she worked on the podcast The Opportunist, before finding her current job at the Met. “All the skills are actually very similar to investigative journalistic research in terms of what I do day-to-day,” she says. “This was really surprising to me because investigative documentary podcasts and The Met are very different worlds.”

At the Met, Dalgleish is excited that her writing is somewhere in the middle of a longer and more collaborative process. “One of the main really helpful things I learned from Oberlin is that there can be really different processes for writing that has different purposes,” she says. To put together the memos that try and match funding sources to exhibits or departments, she digs through research databases and compiles materials from old documents and newspapers. Eventually, her work leads to an art exhibit. 

“My time at Oberlin taught me that storytelling is such an incredibly valuable skill professionally, but it also just makes life so much better,” Dalgleish says. “To be able to tell stories well and be around people who are interested in telling stories—that was something that was really fostered in all the departments I was involved with at Oberlin.” 

Learn more about Oberlin's Communication Studies major, which helps students develop the written, oral, and digital storytelling and communication skills to engage with all kinds of audiences effectively.