What was the best part about starting and running Her Campus this year?
I think it was meeting a whole group of people I never would have met otherwise who have interests so aligned with mine – a team of really intelligent young women from so many different spheres at UBC, who had little or no experience at times but who all came together and blended their voices. It was meeting everyone on the team and seeing how much can be accomplished when you have this one idea, and who would come out to see it through. By my fourth year, I really only meet new people in my year in class, when would I have met you? Everyone gets along so well because we all have similar interests.
What was the hardest part?
I would say probably not anticipating how much time would go into it because it was my last year, I was taking a full course load, and also working another part time job. It’s a lot of pressure and a lot of late nights. I think having to be on top of a lot of people, and myself, was difficult. But it was a good lesson in time management. You want to put your trust in people, but not so much that you don’t have a backup. That’s probably the other hardest thing, finding backups at midnight for articles due the next day.
You have a great story about wanting to start a magazine, could you talk about that?
Well, I’ve always wanted to start my own magazine because I enjoy writing and always wanted to venture into journalism. When I realized that I would be the person people would always come to to look over all their papers, resumes or cover letters I was just like: why is this happening? It made me realized that I could be an editor one day, maybe I could be good at this. Whenever I flipped through magazines I would be cutting stuff out, even when I was a little girl. Growing up I’d read through them and observe, ‘Hey, they could have done that better,’ or, ‘I would have written this differently,’ and worst of all, ‘I can’t believe they published this with a spelling mistake!’ Those things would irk me so much, and that kind of evolved into wanting to have my own thing, where I could do what I wanted and fill the void I could see in so many other publications.
So last year, when I was on exchange in Sweden having drinks with friends one night, I was talking about it and airing my dreams to all these random people – and one of the girls told me about the Her Campus chapter she writes for in Canada and asked me if I’d heard of it. I really hadn’t, because as far as I knew, it was only in the USA. She said, ‘You should think about it!’ So the next day, I woke up and realized there wasn’t one for UBC and told myself, ‘Why not?’
Was it difficult to get Her Campus UBC off the ground?
Well, I had to recruit writers and have an article for each section of the site written by myself before anything started. Her Campus Nationals looked over all that stuff, I had to do an edit test and a Skype interview and a lot more – it pretty much took the whole summer. I applied sometime in May, and by the end of August was when it started to get up and running. I had to reach out to people I knew who were good writers, photographers, anyone in my network. It wasn’t easy – I was still in Sweden, then I came back to Vancouver because my grandmother passed away, and then I went to Kenya to spend the summer there with my dad working, so I wasn’t even here, really. I had to do it all over the place, that’s why it took a lot of time – but it happened!
Was there ever an article section that you wish you could have been approached for?
That’s a really good question! I would say either the Style Blog or maybe Celebrity. The Style Blog is just fun, and everyone loves to be on it. Celebrity maybe, because it’s always nice to be recognized for what you’ve been doing and the work you put into what you have contributed. But that being said, I’ve always thought self-promotion would feel weird (this does too!) and I’ve always wanted to stay out of the limelight, so throughout the year, the Style Blog would have probably been my answer!
You’ve said before that you feel like you have a novel in you. What would your novel be about?
I think I do! I would go back to Kenya (my home country) to write it. I think there are just so many issues that are so present everywhere, but when you’re in a place like that you can see some of them more clearly. Elements like class division, race, even just feelings of home. Kenya is actually such a multicultural community, but I’ve seen it evolve over time. I’ve been back twice since I’ve been here, and even in that time it’s changed drastically. I don’t know what [the hypothetical novel] is yet, but it’s going to be about Kenya for sure. Either that, or I’ve always wanted to write children’s books, I would love to write and illustrate my own. I used to paint a lot, but I haven’t done it in a long time!
Does the idea you had of Her Campus when you were pulling it together match what we have now and what you were planning to accomplish?
I think so, I think it even went beyond that, really. When I started it, when I put the idea together, I hadn’t even recruited all of you yet. In my head I was saying, ‘It’s going to be just me and three other people writing tons of articles every week, and no one is even going to like the Facebook page!’ I think I set myself up for disappointment, so that if everything was really good I would be really happy. I think it’s gone well, and I feel I’ve done a good enough job that I think it will carry on. I see girls here who genuinely have an interest in doing this. It’s such an easy way of speaking to campus without a lot of rigidity and feeling suppressed by the content ideas or pitches you have to adhere to. The best part for me is watching people follow through with their own ideas, because that’s what I really think journalism is about. It’s not me coming in with ten pitches and being saying, ‘You have to write this.’ Sure, everybody has to write certain things, but having your own ideas and materializing it, I think that’s what journalism should be.
The 2013-2014 Her Campus UBC Team
Has Her Campus changed what your goals are, or has it really just affirmed what you want?
I think it’s changed in that I always thought I could be writing for Cosmo or Vogue, but after putting out kind of similar content, it’s fun, but I can see myself losing touch with how relevant or real that content feels to me. I would be happy doing that same kind of journalism for a while, but definitely not forever. I just think there’s a lot more out there I could also be writing about. Before Her Campus, I also always wanted to be a TV presenter, someone who goes into the field in hard-hitting zones to report on groundbreaking news. Every kind of journalism has a purpose, but I want to float around for a while and see where I find my sweet spot.
Even when I wrote for The Ubyssey, I never anticipated enjoying writing for sports, but I really did, because I was able to dig into profiles of athletes who weren’t really well-known but who were so important to their team. For instance, writing about the offensive line of the Thunderbird football team – they were the people doing really important work but no one ever wrote about them; everybody always wrote about the quarterbacks. That was one of my favorite articles to write, just being around all these players dwarfing me who happened to also be the softest and nicest guys ever behind the scenes. So, I think I want to dabble around before I figure out what I really want to get into, because you never know what you’ll end up enjoying down the line.
If you were going to do this year again, is there something you would have wanted to do differently?
I think I would not have committed to so many other things. I would have taken maybe four courses instead of five, I might not have worked part time, just so I could give Her Campus more time. I had wanted to get it more out there than it has been, and also to recruit more people. I would have maybe even have taken on another editor to help get me off the ground. I think I wouldn’t have tried to be so ambitious in trying to do so many things at once. Everybody goes through those periods of the term where you slump, but my slumps were really bad because there was so much happening simultaneously. Also, I probably wouldn’t have done it in my fourth year!
What are you doing next year?
As an editor you don’t personally get to write as much, so over the summer I’m going to be writing a lot because I miss it. Not even just article writing – I used to write so many short stories and poetry that I really want to get back into. Ever since I started writing for The Ubyssey and getting into journalism afterwards, I actually forgot about it, you know? But now I’m done, and I’ve had so much in the past two years to write about and to draw inspiration from that it’s going to be nice to actually do that.
This summer I’m also still working on campus, and after that I hope to be in Vancouver for a while and look for a job somewhere in media, publishing, or anywhere that will hire me! But I definitely would love to get into a communications or editorial kind of role to start with. I’m hopeful, I’m going to be here for a while, I’ll just see where it takes me. I’ll be doing a lot of writing over the summer and hopefully get to freelance some of it. We’ll see how it goes.
How do you think Her Campus has helped or changed you?
I think it has helped me in terms of confidence and leadership, which are two things I never really thought I had in me before. I’ve always been someone who is really quiet and no one ever really saw me in the leadership kind of role before, but I realized it wouldn’t happen unless I seized it for myself. It’s taught me to be a lot more courageous and believe that I can do what I put my mind to. Before, I used to struggle with a lot of confidence issues, thinking that what I was doing was never good enough or could always be better – I’m a perfectionist, it’s natural. But after seeing things come together and have Her Campus UBC materialize, it has been personally been very rewarding for me, for sure. I think it has made me a better editor – I mean, it’s what’s actually made me an editor. I could have hated it but I loved it, and I’d honestly much rather edit an article than write a paper. It’s made me realize what I really want, so I’m happy for that.
What was the most memorable moment with Her Campus this year?
That’s a hard question! I think it could be several. The week where we hit our highest traffic first with our Underground Celebrity articles and suddenly my news feed was flooded with people sharing them, I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s happening! People know who we are!’ That was a really good week for me. Also, at the end of this term when we brought in so many new writers for next year and I couldn’t even get a word in during that meeting I was so happy thinking, ‘There are so many fresh ideas.’ That was a special moment for me – I could see that Her Campus UBC really did have a future because people were brimming with the things that they want to put out there. It made me so content, and I left that meeting really elated. So all in all, being successful in getting the chapter off the ground, and taking in new people who have so many visions for next year was really exciting.
Is there anything you would like to add?
I just want to say that I’ve had an amazing team of people to work with and I can’t say I would have been successful without them backing me. It could have gone so wrong, it could have gone the complete other way and no one would cared – but my writers had such a vested interest and were so committed to it and I respect that so much because it’s not easy. One article may not seem like a big deal to other people, but I know how much work goes into it. I’m happy that the chapter is successful, but it was only with a really good team being there. I hope to see it take off even more in the future!
Interested in writing for Her Campus UBC next year? Get in touch with our editors, or keep up with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stay tuned for more information!