One day, halfway through the last semester of my undergraduate/M.S. college career, a lightbulb went off. There should be a department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science student magazine!
It came as a combination of a few thoughts that had been floating around in my mind:
Combining these thoughts naturally led to a nugget of an idea: to emulate what IEEE nationally does and create a student magazine that highlights work students do.
The only issue was that I had thought of it so late. It was around the end of February or beginning of March, so we had to move fast. Ideally, such a magazine would accept submissions and have them peer-reviewed. Eventually, a whole framework could be set up… in this instance, however, we needed a minimum-viable-product of sorts. Something that would get the ball rolling and set the tone for the future.
At this point, I had learned a great deal from being president of UC at IEEE. One big lesson for myself was that I am not the greatest at delegation; I do well at managing my own time and figuring out what steps I need to take to finish a project, but giving tasks to others is not my strong suit (though I am getting better!) With this knowledge, I sat down and figured out what needed to be done and who to enlist.
The most important task was to find authors. I reached out to specific people that I knew I could count on to write something interesting, quickly. It is unfortunate we did not have time to set up a place to submit, but it would be asking too much on too short a timeframe.
With our authors writing, I then had some help from some amazing people. Dr. Cahay, the EECS department head, helped in every way he possibly could. He has been excited about the project since day 1 and provided all kinds of resources throughout the project. He also encouraged the articles from women & minority groups, which I am so excited to have included in the magazine. Others in the department, Teresa Hamad, Dr. Fuchs, and Dr. Mantei, gave great feedback throughout the project as well. Katey Faber created the original design for the magazine cover, which was hugely helpful as I am no designer. Most of all, Tyler Westland (who was not even in IEEE at the time) had a large amount of experience with LaTeX and did a majority of the work with creating the format. I texted him many times about a fire that needed to be put out and he took care of it almost instantly. I could not have done it without him.
Once we got the articles, we formatted them into LaTeX, and then it was a matter of grammar edits, more and more formatting, and publishing!
This first issue was extremely hectic not only due to the short timeline but because we were started from scratch. Now, the template is set up, and the magazine had a strong first issue. So, so many things can be done from here. A CEAS magazine? Partnerships with companies? It is in the hands of the future IEEE executive members and the future is bright.
Regardless, I am proud of the result, and I appreciate all the help I received along the way. This experience has taught me a great deal about being a leader for a project from start to finish, especially about how to delegate tasks. I cannot wait to see how it goes in the future.