Clubs and jobs, oh my!

If you’ve ever been to one of my live chats or info sessions, you’ve probably heard me yap a lot about all of the things I do on campus. Many of us were part of clubs or other student organizations in high school — related to our academic interests and hobbies or just to meet new people! That’s also the case at college, but what if I told you student involvement goes farther than that?

While I am a part of traditional clubs — like HackSC, our largest hackathon on campus — I’ve also worked for the CS department to write stories about research, events, and accomplishments of professors and students. I’ve copy edited hundreds of articles for Annenberg Media, our student newsroom on campus. I’ve also led labs and office hours for some of our introduction-level CS and electrical engineering classes!

HackSC gave me the opportunity to plan a large-scale event, develop code for a product intended to streamline the event, and create PR material to promote the hackathon in a way similar to how tech companies do so for their products. But at the same time we’re also just a group of college students that hang out! One of my favorite memories has been HackSC Retreat, where I really got to know other members across all six of our teams.

As a course producer (CP), I’ve also had some funny memories of helping students out on their assignments in the same places where I once got help. A lot of the course producers on staff took these classes together, which makes office hours so much more fun! Here, we also get to sometimes (extremely unofficially) give advice to students on their course plans, internship search, or just life in general.

It’s truly a full-circle movement when we see former students become CPs themselves. A lot of my students have taken multiple classes with me as their CP, and they’ll say hi to me when they see me on campus!

I don’t personally know that many engineering students that can say they’ve worked in a functioning newsroom before as a journalist, but I can! While I might not necessarily be planning to go into journalism after graduation — at least not immediately — the experience is similar to interning in a real newsroom, except I do it at school.

I led the copy desk (what I like to say is quality assurance engineering for journalism) at Annenberg Media as a freshman — where I got paid to make sure stories aligned with Associated Press (AP) Style and proper grammar.