Harry Enten ‘07, Using Data to Pave His Own Way
Harry Enten has spent years at the forefront of data-driven journalism, traversing jobs at FiveThirtyEight, The Guardian, and, now, CNN. But, with lived experience spanning well beyond RCS, Enten comments on his alma mater, “when you do well at Riverdale, you know you’re doing well.”
Enten describes that when he began Riverdale in Pre-K, “the idea of going to school was not anything that I wanted to do.” As a younger student, he loved gym and recess. As he got older, however, he discovered his love for history and political science, explaining that he started to find his bearings and realized that doing well in high school would make it easier to do well in life. He remarks, “I studied my butt off, and it ended up working out.”
During his time at Riverdale, Enten took on a variety of extracurricular interests. In elementary school, he was secretary of the student council. In middle school, he got involved in athletics, playing football and baseball, the latter of which he continued on the junior varsity team as an underclassman. His interests in journalism and politics colored his high school activities. Enten wrote for The Riverdale Review, weighing in on the political debates and forecasting of the 2000s, and became the paper’s executive editor in his senior year. Engaging with the political process in a different way, Enten was elected student council representative as a junior and vice president his senior year.
Enten describes himself as someone “really into the weather.” As a high school student, he would email then-Head of the Upper School Mr. Kent Kildahl when he thought there was a decent chance for a snow day after running the numbers, a manifestation of his love for data science that sprouted from his teenage years. Expressing a sentiment that many current students relate to, “I would really be upset [this year] because there’s been 0.4 inches of snow that’s fallen in Central Park.” Enten quips, “If I hadn’t gotten into the career path I did, I may very well have become a meteorologist.”
Especially excited about New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary and the snow, Enten attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire after graduating from Riverdale. He remembers “one of the more shocking results in a primary” that occurred when he was a Dartmouth student: then-Senator Hillary Clinton defeating then-Senator Barack Obama “despite all polls.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Enten chose to major in government but was passionate about “appl[ying] statistical thinking basically to any course [he] possibly could.” While he did not write for the Dartmouth student newspaper, Enten ended up starting an online blog during his junior year there. His blog blossomed into Margins of Error, a CNN podcast, where Enten uses data to examine concepts larger than politics, whether that be why individuals like to root for the underdog or the role of money in determining happiness.
Enten began to hone his craft in the classroom, taking advantage of the greater freedom in taking classes at Dartmouth compared to Riverdale. He recalls a course he took in his sophomore fall on LGBTQ+ studies. For an assignment where students could choose their topic, Enten wrote a ten-page paper on the LGBTQ+ vote during the Democratic primary in 2008. Thinking retrospectively, Enten explains that “at its core, [writing the paper] was exactly what I do every day at my job. I have a thesis, and I go ahead and prove it through statistics.” This process came more naturally to Enten than examining the “themes and motifs that The Scarlett Letter follow[ed]” through “10,000 hidden clues,” an example of what Enten remembers was required to write a thesis statement at Riverdale.
Enten “didn’t really have a job lined up after [he] got out of college,” so his parents encouraged him to keep working on his blog until opportunity arose. Fortunately for him, his moment came when The Guardian, a journal in the UK, offered to pay him for a freelance piece. The paper liked his article, so they initially hired him part-time, which soon blossomed into a full-time position. Enten stayed at The Guardian for slightly under two years until he went to FiveThirtyEight, where he worked for approximately four years.
Although Enten enjoys writing articles, “being able to share [his] thoughts through a visual medium” is what really entices him. In 2018, Enten secured a job at CNN that allows him to write several political analysis articles each week while also engaging in nightly news coverage. Enten appears on the air about six days every week. Regardless of the medium, one thing about Enten has not changed since The Review endorsed his run for vice president of the student faculty council in 2006: his analysis always represents “a masterpiece of realpolitik intellectualism,” focusing on the practical instead of the ideological.
