Early last semester, I joined an incredible team of editors, and designers on the Illumin Magazine Staff. Illumin Magazine is a student run magazine where we read student works and compile the best articles in an issue every one to two months.
All students at USC are required to take two writing course, Writing 150, a general course for freshmen, and Writing 340, mostly taken your Junior year. Writing 340 has many more themes and becomes a more applicable writing course for your major. For engineering students, there is a technical writing course to teach students how to write about what they do in engineering and engineering topics in a concise and clear way.
That’s where Illumin comes in!
Throughout the writing course, there are various papers that will be assigned and one is called the Illumin article. The Illumin article focuses on covering a topic or item in our everyday life and showing the engineering principles behind it. The about 150 students that take the various sections of this course, submit their article to Illumin, and then the staff of editors (me 🙂 ) go about reading them. We read about 200 articles a semester and we try to publish 2 issues a semester. All of the articles come from Undergraduate students at USC.
Got a selfie at our morning meeting with the @illuminmagazine staff pic.twitter.com/TfrWYL4HI3
— Betty Stearns (@StearnsBetty) February 6, 2015
This program give a great opportunity to get an article published and out into the world. Articles have been published in course readers, textbooks, and encyclopedias all over the world. We get readers from 80 countries and people use the articles in every which way. Some elementary school teachers even use the articles to explain engineering concepts in basic every day things that kids love, like roller coasters!
Its so awesome being able to read all of the articles and learn about such different engineering topics, and I love being able to tell students that they’ve been published and a reputable University magazine!
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