If you’ve ever struggled with boys, girls, relationships, friends etc., you are no different than every other girl and guy on the JMU campus, including Junior and CampusCrush101 advice blogger, April Cargill. April first became involved with CampusCrush101 as part of a class project where the class had to pair off into groups and decide on a topic to create a website about. Her group’s focus was creating a website that would provide college-aged students with dating advice.
Together, they would come up with different posts discussing various dating related topics and then publish them to the homepage. Today, they have continued to keep the website up and running and have added a lot of new content, including an ‘Ask April’ section that specifically targets individual viewers. Here students can post their questions, explain their situations and April will respond with the best advice she can!
April is a Communication Studies major with a concentration in Public Relations. She is also in the sorority Alpha Sigma Alpha where she holds the executive position of Vice President of Alumnae and Heritage, is a member of PRSSA (Public Relations Student Society of America), part of Mortar Board (an association of selected future seniors that display scholarship, leadership and service), and lastly, she is a mentor to her ‘little sister’ for the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. Needless to say, April is a very busy girl on the JMU campus, but she still manages to put a whole lot of effort into CampusCrush101 as well.
“When I give advice to my readers, I try to put myself into the situation. I ask myself, ‘If this was to happen to me, how would I feel? What would I do?’ Of course I also use my own dating experiences,” says April. She also notes that when it comes down to her own dating experiences, she always seeks advice from her friends. “Often when you have feelings for a specific person, you don’t always think very rationally. This is when best friends come in handy for some outside perspective. They are the people that know me the best and are always very aware of whatever situations I’m getting myself into. Also, they are the people that care about me and that I truly trust.”
Although you may not even know April, her advice column can help serve as that kind of advice that you may try seeking from a friend. It can also be, in some cases, more beneficial because sometimes the problems you may be having are dealing with your close group of friends. In these cases, April can serve as an unbiased third party outsider, which is just what you are going to need!
The types of questions April has received have dealt with topics from both males and females and range from how guys can get girls, condoms, porn, unfaithful boyfriends, flirting, guys that are too serious and many more. She says, “There are no limits on the questions we get and well, that’s life for you!”
After reading the ‘Ask April’ section, it is obvious that April takes great pride in making sure her advice is complete and thorough. Her advice is lengthy and very specific to each person’s problem. This got me wondering if April ever gets questions that she doesn’t know how to answer! “Getting difficult questions that leave me contemplating how to respond does occur sometimes. Advice doesn’t always mean a relationship problem is going to be fixed either, because it’s up to the individual with the issue for how the situation will be sorted out. I just try to provide an alternative perspective to their situation based on my own opinion.”
CampusCrush101 is definitely an awesome tool for any college student in need of life advice or just a different perspective on a personal issue. And April Cargill’s ‘Ask April’ section is user-friendly and very helpful for those specific problems that you just can’t seem to fix!
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at JMU chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.