Her Campus Carleton is 10 years old this year and we couldn’t be more excited to see how our chapter has grown over the past decade!
The Carleton chapter of Her Campus was founded and established in 2012 by Jasmine Williams, a second-year journalism student, and Harsimar Singh, a second-year commerce student. Williams had initially been following Her Campus chapters at other schools and thought that it would be something that Carleton women would greatly benefit from (and we are sure glad that they brought it here!)
Her Campus is an online magazine targeted at female college students. There are over 400 campus chapters in over nine different countries. The publication was founded in 2009 (just three years prior to the Carleton chapter being founded) in Boston, Massachusetts by three Harvard undergraduate students; Annie Wang, Stephanie Kaplan, and Windsor Hanger. The publication features articles written by university-aged women on a wide variety of topics ranging from style, health and wellness, romance, life, and pop culture.
The Carleton chapter was run by Singh and Williams for two years then went on a hiatus — until 2018, when the chapter was relaunched by Melanie Ritchot and Hunza Chaudhary. Ritchot and Chaudhary were co-correspondents for Her Campus Carleton for the 2018-2019 year and set up the groundwork for our current chapter.
Currently, our chapter has 11 executive team members and over 40 writers and is consistently growing. We are now a gold-level chapter and are continuing to grow every year!
As the current events director for HCCarleton, I was curious about what type of events the chapter held in 2012. One of my favourite events that Her Campus Carleton did in the early days of the chapter was their #campuscutie campaign.
It appeared as if they would choose a person from the Carleton community and do a feature article on them for the month. They would ask them questions like “what’s your program?” “who was your biggest inspiration growing up?” “what is your favourite music?” and “what is your ideal date?”
The chapter and the writer would essentially try to make a “dating profile” or a “get to know them” to show off their “campus cutie” to the Her Campus Carleton community. I don’t know about you, but I kinda like this idea… do we need to bring it back and give it a modern twist??
Another event that seemed to happen almost every year was pub night! Pub nights were hosted by the Her Campus Carleton chapter and would take place at different bars in Ottawa. For example, in February of 2014, Her Campus Carleton hosted a “PINK is the new BLACK” pub night at the Green Room on York Street. It seems the chapter would host these almost every semester and it sure looked fun! I think we might also need to bring this back…
This past March was International Women’s Month and Carleton has been looking back at members of our Her Campus family and learning about their time in our chapter. We are so thankful to Jasmine and Harsimar for bringing Her Campus to Carleton and to Melanie and Hunza for rejuvenating the chapter!
We are forever in debt to the lovely ladies who have come before us and made the chapter the amazing community that is Her Campus Carleton.