15 Minutes - January

Staff Spotlight: Sarah Luo 

--- Lena Lam

     “Sleep well, you sexy beast”: the last words that flash across her phone’s screen before it turns off.  Though I have only known Sarah for a few months, her answer does not surprise me. I’m getting ahead of myself though—I’m supposed to be introducing you to our brilliant editor-in-chief. Given the chance to ask her any interview questions I wanted, I was ecstatic about being able to throw random questions at her to see how she would answer. Of course, I kept in mind the ulterior motive: find out as much about Sarah as I could in less than 20 questions. Here’s how it went: 

     The first thing you should know about Sarah, according to her anyways, is that she’s Asian. It’s such a declarative sentence, leaving the audience to decide for itself which definition of “Asian” she is referring to; there’s the physical description, the unbelievably smart stereotype, and then there’s the stingy, coupon-saving tendency. Don’t jump to any conclusions about her just yet. 

      We covered some of the usual stuff, such as likes, dislikes, what she does in her spare time, etc. 

Her least favorite season: winter. What she does in her spare time: watch t.v. and/or movies, and play Tetris. What she thinks is a waste of time: Gossip Girl. (I did not ask her how she came to that conclusion.) Colors she believes go well together: black and grey.  She would like someone to please hurry up and invent teleportation. 

     Those answers should paint a decent picture of what kind of person Sarah is, but being the slow person I am, I only had a rough sketch in my mind at this point in the interview. So I asked her to list three adjectives that definitely do not describe her. She chose “lame,” “short,” and “dumb.” Similar to her previous “Asian” answer, her answer was blunt and simple. 

Just for fun, I threw some weird questions at her. 

L: The delivery person just knocked on your door. Who is it and what are they delivering? 

S: Pizza guy, and he’s delivering M&Ms . . . on pizza. 

L: In a game of Charades, how would you act out the movie title “Free Willy”?

S: My first thought is to do the seal clap but then I realized that’s not a whale…So, I don’t know how I would act it out. 

L: Look at your keyboard. Which key(s) have you never used before, if any? 

S: Q, X, and Z. 

     Despite all of the random questions, I managed to come to a (tentative) conclusion about what type of person Sarah is. If everyone in the world were either a coloring book or a crayon, Sarah would definitely be a crayon. She does the coloring, but that is not to say that she isn’t also colored by the moments she spends with friends and family. Yes, she colors within the lines (most of the time), but the skies aren’t always blue and the trees aren’t always green. Regardless, the picture will be surprisingly original and wonderful, which shouldn’t be a surprise since Sarah colored it herself.