AT 3 A.M. ON a late June night, Juliette Love was on deadline at the New York Times.
Love, now a Stanford junior majoring in computer science, was days into an internship in the graphics department of the Times and already getting a taste of the scrutiny that accompanies every piece considered for publication.
The graphic had to be completed in time for editors to make final decisions story placement for the Sunday editions. Her project was a key element to a story on a migrant detention center in Clint, Texas.
Love was tasked with providing a visual of the complex even though no contemporary pictures were allowed to be taken. Using personal accounts, old photos, and blueprints, Love's team somehow weaved them together. When the Sunday paper rolled off the presses, Love's name was on it. The graphic made the front page.
From her tiny studio apartment on Manhattan's West Side, Love began each morning with a run along the Hudson River and, throughout her summer, tried to find a way to keep her edge to prepare for Stanford's squash season.
On Friday, Stanford begins play in the Howe Cup, the national championship tournament, with Love at the No. 7 position. The Cardinal plays Yale in a matchup of teams coached by the Talbott brothers, Mark for Stanford and Dave for Yale. Last year, Stanford finished a program-best third.
In the U.S., squash is centered in the Northeast. On the eight Howe Cup teams, only three players are from California and only two from the Bay Area. One is Love.
* * *
Photo by Cody Glenn/ISIphotos.com.
GROWING UP IN San Carlos, just north of Stanford, Love played squash mostly recreationally. Her parents, John and Patricia, were Wisconsin natives who learned the game in Washington, D.C., and taught it to Juliette and her brother Charlie. They played as a family on Friday nights on courts in Redwood Shores.
"For a really long time, that's all that I knew of squash," Love said. "We had no idea there was a whole junior circuit, that there were points, that you could get rankings. We were, being on the West Coast, totally isolated from all that. That was good in a lot of ways, because I learned to love the sport, and that's all it was for me."
As part of the first high school graduating class of The Nueva School, on the site of the old Bay Meadows Racetrack in San Mateo, Love began to take squash more seriously. She got coaching and entered tournaments, often back East.
"I was starting from a place where I would get pretty much crushed," she said. "But it makes it really easy to have a nice upward trend. It felt good to continually rise in the rankings."
Besides squash and running – she was Nueva's No. 1 runner on its 2016 Central Coast Section Division V champion cross country team – Love had an interest in data analysis and visual presentations of it. She taught herself how to combine the two into graphic elements and did so as a hobby.
"I always looked to the New York Times as a great example," Love said. "They have such a cool visual style. I always thought that it was really impressive visual journalism. I tried to learn from the techniques they were doing."
When Kevin Qualey of the New York Times data and visual journalism team came to speak at Stanford, Love brought her portfolio. Qualey was so impressed, he forwarded her work to his editors and they created an internship.
"It was so validating to have these personal projects that I had always done for my own interest, recognized by the New York Times," Love said. "And then to be able to work alongside the people whose projects I had been trying to emulate … that was an amazing experience."
In a story headlined "How Popular is Baseball, Really?", Love, a fan of baseball's Milwaukee Brewers and football's Green Bay Packers, produced a front-page piece that she wrote and provided the visual elements. It examined whether baseball was declining in popularity compared to the NFL and NBA.
Love made a case that baseball teams are more popular regionally, but teams and players in the NBA and NFL have more exposure nationally.
Whether Love continues returns to journalism is something she doesn't even know.
"That was the coolest thing I've ever done," she said. "But I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Next summer, I'm going a totally different direction."
She'll be in London delving into data analysis and software engineering at DeepMind, a Google artificial intelligence lab. And training for her senior season.
Photo by Bob Drebin/ISIphotos.com.