When I was a senior in college I got involved with, our, school literary magazine, which happened to be an art and literary magazine for student and faculty members.
And, it was also open to alumni.
Uh, uh, it was little different than the, literary magazine that had originally existed at our school, which was pretty low in quality.
And, um, there were a lot of people who actually wouldn't submit their work to it because they didn't want it to be seen along side of the things that, were pretty juvenile.
So, in my senior year, a couple of us got together with some professors and we decided to put together this, new literary magazine that would, uh, target a, you know, a broader audience and, you know, hold up a higher standard with the work that we accepted, and were willing to publish.
And it, it turned out to be something that was quite successful and, I was really proud to be a part of it.
Um... We decided to go with a female theme originally, um, because we felt that it was something that was really lacking in our college community as well.
So... our, our theme was women in their life span.
But, uh, we didn't exclude men.
In fact, we had many, male students on staff.
And, uh, one of our sponsoring professors was a man.
So... It certainly wasn't limiting in that sense.
Um... And it was also very interesting because we got to, to target a lot of social issues that were, very much swept under the carpet um, at our school which tended to be very conservative.
And um... We did a lot with, uh, sexual harassment and... We, um, we tried to... to target different... different issues that, we felt the other literary magazines weren't even coming close to approaching.
Our previous magazine, really just... had a lot of... what I think people... think of as overly dramatic.
Um... The kind of things you may see more in a high school setting.
And, I think that we, we kind of... stepped things up a bit with... with the magazine that we put out.
And, we wound up winning an award for it, which... gave us a bigger budget and was really nice.
Uh, after our first year of... putting it out and, we were able to, to put together a pretty quality publication.
Um... It was a lot of work.
I mean I was, I was going to school full time... while I was working on this and because I was editor-in-chief, I was responsible for... pretty much everything.
Um... I had the final say on all the submissions and, I also had to just make sure that we made all the deadlines.
I had get the thing to print... when it was, time to send it to print.
And... You know I had to, had to deal with the budget.
I had to figure out... How much everything's gonna cost.
How much we could afford.
I had to work with the art directors, which wasn't always an easy task, because the art directors and, the uh, the editors who were, in charge of the literary end of it didn't always see eye to eye on everything.
And because a lot of the, art, was going to be illustrating some of the writing, we had some political differences huhu.
Which I had to, you know, try to smooth over.
And, in the end we put out something we were really happy with.
Um... And, I actually think that it was working on this magazine that helped me to, to get the job that I have now, that I'm out of college.
Because it is really hard when you, you know when you come from a college setting where you are just doing a lot of academic writing... to... you know, the working world where they want to see, that you can actually make something transfer into... you know, a publishing type setting.
So I think the fact that I, was able to get the whole project off the ground in college... really helped me, um, it gave me something a little different to put in my portfolio because, other than that it was really just going to be a lot of, uh, the kind of work that, every college student has to show for themselves by the time they finished, you know, four years in a_ any institution.
So I'm, I'm, I'm pretty happy that i, I was able to do that.