The Advocate Competition Reflection

The Advocate has finally finished the Monsoon season publication, I talk about the preparation and organization of it here. Overall I would consider the project a success and am proud of the teams work behind it, there were many creative submissions and the design was fun and minimalist, focused just on presenting its content. However this being the Advocate’s second ever print publication, and me being the only non new member, there were also challenges with printing, scheduling and more general difficulties with advertising seen every year.

With regards to advertising we experimented with the model of putting fliers into every locker in school, you would think this would grab peoples attention but somehow it did not. It appears that the majority of people simply put the note aside or ignored it or trashed it, without really considering it, in future we will look for more personally engaging forms of advertising. One model we are considering on this front is giving teacher small cards telling students that some work they’ve submitted should be submitted, with spaces for the students name and the title of their work. Through this project I have thus improved my skills as a communicator with large groups and so my ability to collaborate with others.

Another significant issue was that we had to commit to being within very specific schedule and had little flexibility when things were missed as we had to work with external groups for judging and printing. As we had to have three separate judges for the different aspects of the competitions there were delays with designing the final digital copy which would have led to delays meeting the print deadlines, but we managed to rush the design process to make up for this. Sadly this led to certain corners being cut in some pages looking somewhat awkward. In future I know to leave mire time in the schedule for judging, and that less time is actually needed for submission as people usually only submit with the last two available weeks anyway.

From the process of creating and running this competition and magazine I have significantly developed my ability to persevere through problems, collaborate with groups and coordinate and plan activities.