Everyone: “What is Her Campus again?”
Me: “It’s, like, our school’s online magazine. We can write about anything and we get published onto the larger website of HerCampus.com”
Everyone: “Ohhh yeah, I’ve read a few articles on there before. They’re cute.”
Me: “Yas girl, hey you should join!”
Everyone: “Uhm no, I literally can’t write, plus I have no idea what I’d write about.”
This tends to be a common conversation ladies, is it not? Low and behold, the masterminds behind these ~*~amazing~*~ articles are JUST YOUR AVERAGE, RUN OF THE MILL, COLLEGE STUDENTS. Yes, that amazing soothing voice that reads you these words of wisdom can INDEED be you! It just needs three easy steps:
1. Join Her Campus at your school
You can’t be successful in anything until you understand the basis of what it is. Her Campus, as we like to say, is a “collegiate’s guide to life.” We like to define collegiate as: “col•le•giette [kuh-lee-jet] noun, a college woman who is on top of her game – strategically career-minded, distinctly fashionable, socially connected, academically driven and smartly health-conscious, who endeavors to get the most out of her college experience on every level.”
Yes honey, that’s you and you know it! There are chapters at hundreds of schools. We started our own at Scranton 2 years ago. All you need to do is join and set up an account, and you’re already onto Step 2! Wasn’t that easy?
2. Write the article of your dreams
The dreaded step. The hardest part. The bane of your Her Campus existence. The article.
It may seem so hard to write. What do you even write about? Are you even cool enough to write about anything? Where do you even start?
You can seriously write about anything, as long as you open it up to everyone so that they can take away from it. Has anything profound happened to you that you learned a major life lesson from? Write about it! Have you started a new cleanse or workout regime and seen results? Write about it! Has something come up in the news that you feel collegiates like yourself just have to read about? Write about it! Worst comes to worst, you have a foundation of fellow Her Campus writers around you that you can ask for help if you reach your first writer’s block. Once you get that initial push of creativity, you can take that and run with it.
I personally have found that writing a weekly article for Her Campus has helped me out so much. I can write about things that personally affect me in a light-hearted, yet informative way. It’s like a huge vent session, where I can rant about ex boyfriends, depression, foreign affairs that hit close to home, and school life. And at the end of each article, I feel like I have actually accomplished something, maybe even helped someone out in a #relatable way. And you know what? YOU CAN TOO!
So think hard and open up your laptop, the words will just start flowing.
3. Sit back and enjoy the praise
Now that the hardest part is over, you can finally sit back and watch the editors suffer through your typos and grammatical errors. Once their misery has subsided, you have a published article!
The thing about Her Campus is, as bad as your article (potentially) can be, your school’s team of editors and writers will help you reach success regardless. People will read your article and actually take something away from it, and your fellow writers will praise you on how creative and amazing you are. And you knew that anyways, so it’s just a confidence boost.
Look at me! I just wrote an article about how to write an article to get you to write an article, too ;)