alumni newsletter
Putting Together the Skol'Holer
by Jenny
Although the Skol Hol'er has gone through many spelling changes in its name, been put together by many different staff members, and has been headed by a variety of editors, one thing always stays the same: the Skol Hol'er keeps putting the word out to the scholarship hall community.
As a creative writing major, and a person with experience putting together our high school literary magazine, I thought I should run for the ASHC position of Publications Chair. The position required that I put out two editions of the Skol Hol'er per semester and a summer edition to be mailed to incoming freshmen. At first, I thought I could handle this. However, putting out a newsletter and being in charge of your staff is not quite that easy.
The summer edition went off without a hitch. One of the girls on ASHC exec board helped me put it together. She was doing an internship with housing, so she had easy access to the people and information we needed. One nice thing about the Skol Hol'er is that we are funded by ASHC, so I did not have to worry about fundraising or selling advertising space to keep us going.
However, getting out the first edition for all the halls was tough. Homecoming was early in October, and I wanted to get an issue out that week so the halls could read and see what was going on in the community. Plus, I wanted to re-cap some of the Hawk Week activities. First, I had to make spiffy flyers encouraging people to join the staff. I had a good handful of people still on the staff from the previous year, but I wanted us to have such a big staff that each person would only have to worry about one article or assignment to work on instead of forcing someone to reluctantly take on three.
Soon, I had a few applications, and we had our first staff meeting. The list of staff I email is about 15, although not everyone has time to contribute to each issue. It was stressful getting articles and pictures together. We had lots of copy editors, a few reporters, a couple of layout editors and one photographer. Luckily, one of our reporters got a digital camera for her birthday and was able to help out our lone photographer. I sent my staff a list of contact information ASHC had compiled of everyone with a position in their halls (i.e. presidents, social chairs, ASHC representatives). Now we had sources.
Next thing I knew, layout was the main issue. The ASHC computer does not have Microsoft Publisher. And the Mac computers in the Art and Design Building are only available certain hours, and it was hard enough finding a time when I could meet with the other two layout designers. So, for the first issue, since Homecoming was the next week, I stayed up late and put the whole thing together on my computer.
The next few times, I was able to meet with layout and things were easier since we now had a basic design for the Skol Hol'er that we liked. We have our favorite funky fonts and great spread formats. Also, ASHC is using extra funds it has to purchase an updated version of Microsoft Publisher to put on the office computer. Now, any ASHC member can go in and work on the upcoming newsletter.
I have one more newsletter left to go, but I think it will be much easier now that the staff and I know how to work together and find resources. It takes a lot of communication and time to get everything put into a newsletter. We are excited for our upcoming last issue and our cool staff t-shirts that we are waiting to come in.
The Skol Hol'er may look different from when you were in the scholarship halls, but the process is still the same, as is the important news we report to the community.
