On April 18th 2020, we hosted our first Instagram Live Q&A session to give incoming April students an idea of what Her Campus is and what our chapter does. While in typical circumstances, we would have been able to host in-person recruitment events, due to the COVID-19 pandemic we have opted to host this session as a part of our virtual recruitment initiative. The event was hosted by our President Lisa and Events and Marketing Director Ayaka. The following are some of the key takeaways from the livestream for those who were unable to attend!
- General Questions with Editor in Chief Sarah
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What is Her Campus?
Her Campus is a company based in Boston, Massachusetts, that creates and publishes content for college students. As an HC chapter, we write and publish articles that are of interest to ICU students. HCICU is made up of our writing, events, and social media teams!
Can you be in several teams? ex) Events and Writing
Of course! There are many people who are in multiple teams, or even in all three teams!
What is the commitment like?
The commitment level is dependent on a lot of factors. If you’re on multiple teams, you’ll be busier than if you were on just one. For the events team, certain times of year (ICU Festival and new student orientation) might be busier than other times of the year. It also depends on the number of members we have—having more members would lead to smoother operations and each person having less on their plate. We’re all about teamwork! Overall, HCICU is an organization that you can definitely balance with other commitments and clubs!
Is this club limited to females?
No! This is a question we tend to get a lot, especially since the organization is called Her Campus. While Her Campus, the company, has originated with the intent of being “by college women, for college women,” our organization, HCICU, cares deeply for the diversity of the ICU student body and wants our team to reflect this. If you’re interested in joining one of our teams, we welcome you with open arms regardless of your gender and identity!
How do freshmen join?
Send us a DM through our twitter or instagram!
- Writing with Senior Editor Yukiko
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What is the role of the writing team?
Our writing team is actually the largest team in our organization! The writing team generates the articles that are published on our website. We’re very diverse in the topics and the languages we write in. We publish articles mostly in English, but we also publish Japanese articles. If you have any weird or crazy ideas for articles, we can make it happen!
What if I’m more confident in Japanese?
That’s totally valid! We understand that there are a lot of ICU students who might feel this way, but fear not! You can write and publish your article in Japanese too. However, we do have to publish each article in English, so someone on our editing team will create an English translation for your article so that we can publish them side by side! We’re looking forward to publishing more Japanese articles.
Even if you aren’t confident in your English article, our editors will make sure your article is ready for publishing. While they will fix your grammar, your creative voice will never be lost in the editing process!
Can you tell us about the topics of the articles?
Our topics are really diverse—everything from entertainment, lifestyle, fitness, mental health, and more! We have other topics we have yet to explore, including relationships, careers, food, and beauty. If you have an idea to write something you can definitely find a category to publish it under.
Who is the audience?
We are mostly writing to ICU students, but anyone can access our website and articles! We hope that people who are planning to enter ICU or study abroad here might access our website to learn more about ICU.
What’s a day in the life of a HCICU writer like?
For the most part, a writer’s week will consist of brainstorming and writing articles! If you have an idea, pitch your article topic to the editors and get started on your draft. There are due dates for drafts, but the date will change depending on the time it will take to edit and prepare the article for publication. For example, Japanese articles are due sooner because it will take time to translate your article as well.
What are some things you have done or will do as a team?
We’ve been doing virtual writing workshops! We brainstorm article topics together and learn how to edit articles. In our most recent workshop we did an exercise on “how to write an effective title” to grab the attention of your audience.
- Social Media with Social Media Director Satomi
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Tell us about what the SNS team does
We promote our events and articles on our social media, as well as spreading positive energy through our posts! We also generate our own content, like graphic design and photography to make our page look nice. We’re definitely looking for people who are interested in creating content for our page!
What types of social media is HCICU on?
We’re on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook currently but we might expand! We could do TikTok or YouTube as well. It depends on what we can handle and what our members want to do!
How does/will the team communicate?
We’re planning on hosting digital meetings during the pandemic. Right now we’re still in the process of figuring out how we want our team to work since it’s only been a month since our chapter has launched. But we’re definitely going to get more people involved and have more collaborations in the near future.
How many times a week do you post?
For now we’re posting three times a week on Instagram, but our goal is to post everyday. It’s actually quite a lot of work managing three platforms at the same time!
What about language?
Right now we’re trying to put Japanese and English on every platform, which is difficult for Twitter since there’s a character limit. We’re focusing on posting in Japanese on Twitter because our April students tend to be more active on Twitter.
- Events with Events and Marketing Director Ayaka
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Tell us about the events team!
We coordinate Her Campus and ICU events! For ICU events, we do Hanami, which is our new student orientation, and ICU Festival. For Her Campus events, we want to do stuff like hosting a movie night or social events at Bakayama!
So now with the Coronavirus Pandemic, how will things change?
We need to Stay At Home! We’ve been having some online meetings for Her Campus, but we’ll host in person events as soon as we can do so safely. We want to expand our event possibilities in the digital realm as well! We’re thinking of having a virtual graduation for students who are graduating this term.
So, there is an annual school festival—ICU FEST. Will HCICU be part of it?
We would love to be a part of ICU Fest. I think it’s happening in November this year. They have a lot of stands for the festival, so we’ve been thinking of doing a bake sale or something like that. It would be a fun way to get our team to collaborate and flex our marketing muscles!
What will we do as a team?
We have an Events group on LINE, but we haven’t done anything with it yet because we’re still recruiting. We’re going to start brainstorming for events in the group soon though! We would love to collaborate with other organizations on campus, as well as with Her Campus Waseda.
We hope our Instagram Live session answered some of your questions about our organization! If you’re interested in HCICU we’d love for you to join us! Be sure to stay in touch with us through our social media!