(TV Writer & Producer, Speechless, The Office, The Simpsons)

By Adrian Horton AB '17

For some, the path to a Hollywood career is circuitous—full of left turns, doubt, and reconsiderations. Not so for Daniel Chun AB '02, a TV writer and producer who has worked for some of Hollywood’s most beloved comedies, including The Simpsons and The Office. For Chun, comedy writing has always been the game (with a degree in biological anthropology on the side).

Chun, who is Korean-American, grew up in a small town in Northeastern Pennsylvania not far from The Office’s fictional home of Scranton. He first realized his interest in creative writing around seventh or eighth grade. As a teenager, he and his school friends were “pretty obsessed with comedy”—Saturday Night Live, The Kids in the Hall—"so we would write and shoot stupid little sketches late at night in my basement.”

VP, Live-Action Development (Unscripted) at Nickelodeon

By Adrian Horton AB '17

In retrospect, it’s almost as if Mandel Ilagan’s career in unscripted content was, well, scripted. When other kids at his school in Cooper City, Florida, sought the playground at recess, Mandel would lead classmates in an impromptu version of The Price is Right. When friends came over, they’d spend hours playing board games or watching game shows. And by the time he arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1995, after having studied humor and screenwriting at a Harvard Summer School course the summer before, Ilagan knew that he wanted to work in television.

“That being said, we know that there's no real sort of TV division at Harvard,” he recounts one afternoon in March. He took the lack of plotting as an opportunity for growth; to give himself “as broad an education as possible,” he opted to concentrate in economics.

Writer & Producer, Kung Fu Panda 1, 2, & 3, Trolls

By Adrian Horton AB '17

To hear him tell it, Jonathan Aibel AB '91 always had a creative bent, though it took him nearly a quarter century to learn what a spec script was. Growing up in Demarest, New Jersey, right outside Manhattan, Aibel participated in theatre in high school, then continued indulging his creative side while at Harvard. The psychology major unofficially minored in music theory and a cappella (he was a four year member of the Din & Tonics), before penning the Hasting Pudding Theatricals show with a friend in his senior year.

Poet, Essayist, and Novelist (300 Arguments)

By Adrian Horton AB '17

Sarah Manguso AB '97 did not dream of writing while growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She didn’t write creatively in high school. In fact, the first time this poet, essayist, and soon-to-be novelist remembers writing—or, as she says, “consciously writing in a directed way, thinking about myself as engaging in ‘writing,’”—was in college, when she began composing short poems. The shift to poetry was part of an unexpected course change for Manguso, who arrived at Harvard from Wellesley High School with pre-med ambitions. As a “middle class townie girl,” she recalls, “the only greater achievement than getting into Harvard that my family or I could imagine [was] becoming a doctor. So I set out to become a doctor.” (photo to the left by Andy Ryan)