Underground Campus Celeb: Sage Amdahl
Lounging on the couch in the Quaker Campus (QC) office, our bellies full of frozen yogurt and candy, Sage Amdahl recounts an instance from high school in which a strange man catcalled her in Boston. “I got up all in his face and screamed at him,” she recalls lightly.
Burrowing herself deeper into the plush cushions, she adds, laughing, “High school Sage was a fighter. I would call out catcallers and say, ‘What the fuck did you just say?’”
Which is not to say she isn’t a fighter now. With a sharp tongue and a solid throwing arm to boot, Amdahl is more than capable of standing up for herself. Even if a physical fight is not what she’s hoping for, there’s another surefire way of taking them down: with her words.
“I’ve verbally decimated a few men’s egos,” she says proudly. “It’s a miracle that I’m still alive.”
But what is it that draws people — both the weirdos and normies alike — to her? Even at her most exhausted, Amdahl exudes a playful and self-assured energy that makes you feel excited to see her. Amdahl has the humor of a mid-2010s teenage boy — she often indicates her confusion by saying, “I am Confucius” — and sometimes it will pull a laugh out of you. Other times, her words leave strange men fearing the wrath of, not God, but Sage Amdahl.
When she’s not verbally decimating men, Amdahl can be found either drinking deliciously cheap Trader Joe’s wine, or drawing portraits of a scantily clad Johnny Poet — Whittier College’s mascot. Or both! Who knows!
The aforementioned scantily clad Johnny Poet refers to the Sexy Johnny illustration that appeared on the cover of the Quaker Campus’ 2023 Valentine’s Day issue. Wearing a hot-pink tricorne and an extremely low-necked tank top — unfortunately, sans the original nipple piercing — Sexy Johnny shot Amdahl into the sphere of low-key campus celebrity. “One time,” she says, “I was talking to someone, and their friend was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re Sage? I have Sexy Johnny on my wall!’”
As the longest-running QC staff member, Amdahl is all too familiar with the newspaper’s constant demands. It started in her first year of college: “Joe Donnelly forced me at gunpoint,” she quips, throwing her head back to laugh. “There was no option.”
Jokes aside, Amdahl cites the COVID-19 pandemic as the real reason she joined the QC — and stayed. According to Amdahl, lockdown was an incredibly lonely time for a social butterfly like her, and her first year as a college student — the time she expected to make new friends and share new experiences — was limited to endless hours on Zoom. Even if joining the QC wasn’t originally her idea, she was grateful for the community that it offered her.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Amdahl, though. After rising through the ranks from Staff Writer to Art and Photos Editor, Amdahl was informed that she would be the Managing Editor for the 2023–24 school year. “When I was first told, ‘You’re going to be the Managing Editor,’ I said, ‘What if I quit?’” she jokes.
Although originally begrudging to accept the new role, Amdahl’s semester abroad in Liverpool gave her time to warm up to the idea. Upon returning to Whittier in the Spring, she embraced the position.
Now, she is thoroughly enjoying her head position, and she cites Editor-in-Chief Emily Henderson as a main factor. “I’m enjoying my job now because Em makes it lovely,” she shares sincerely. “It’s also fun to boss people around a bit.” The only part of the job that isn’t lovely, in her opinion, is spending hours readjusting the margins of each section every other week.
It is clear that Amdahl has both a talent and a passion for Graphic Design, so much so that she considered it as a major before writing it off, deeming it too stressful. Which makes sense. She already spends far too much time fretting over the visual cohesion of the Quaker Campus, so why add Graphic Design homework on top of it?
That meant she could move forward with her original plan: History.
Amdahl is one of four graduating History majors this year, and she couldn’t be more thrilled and terrified. Upon graduating, she intends to alternate between Madison, Wis. and Chicago, but she will definitely not be coming back to LA — “I don’t like LA,” she declares decisively, “I don’t like the lack of public transit.” After taking some time to recover her mental state and pad her savings account, Amdahl then plans on applying to graduate school to continue her studies in History. “Maybe grad school will be in Chicago,” she speculates. “Maybe it’ll be on the East Coast. Boston is pretty high up on my list, it’s more affordable than New York.”
Despite knowing that she wants to pursue a Master’s degree in History, she admits that she doesn’t “know what era [or] what niche hole I’ll crawl into quite yet,” but she is certain that she’ll find that hole eventually.
Even if she is unsure about her immediate future, she can clearly envision who and what she’ll be when she’s 50. Along with financial and emotional stability, she says earnestly, “I would like to be Professor [Elizabeth Sage] 2.0.”
“I want to have a dog or cat that I dress up in cute sweaters. And I want to come to class and be a professor who says fun things and teaches fun things,” she shares. She also sees herself, Professor Sage Amdahl, sitting poolside with a glass of wine — expensive wine, hopefully — dog at her side, and a stack of ungraded papers on her lap. “Professor [Elizabeth Sage] has her margaritas,” she says jokingly, “I want wine.”
Photo courtesy of Sage Amdahl / Quaker Campus.
