More than once have I came across somebody in my life asking me, "Why do you write for the Odyssey?" "What does it mean to be an Editor-in-Chief?" Or even people will ask, "What's the point of Odyssey?"
Well, I found out about Odyssey towards the end of my first semester of my freshman year of college. A classmate of mine had posted about it, and I immediately looked into it. I had always read Odyssey articles prior, and always found happiness in exploring and reading what other people had to say about many different topics, just like you.
What I didn't know: That any college student could be granted the opportunity to write. Which then, was the coolest thing ever. And now, is still the coolest thing ever.
You might be thinking, "Yeah okay, but what do you actually do?" "What can I benefit from this?"
With Odyssey, and being the editor for the Westfield Community, a lot has to be done every week in order for our community to be successful.
In the typical week, we all start off by generating topic ideas, in a special group chat setting we have, this is only the case because we are all in different cities and towns during the summer months. Meeting up every week would be close to impossible. Depending on our different idea's some of us may have to do extra research, and on certain occasions, we would even have to set up an interview with someone to dig deeper to produce an even better article. When we all have our ideas we begin to write.
We write and rewrite and find mistakes, fix them, until we finally have what we think could be a final product. But it doesn't end there.
At this point, myself being the editor I will edit everyone's pieces, and make sure our content is looking great to me.
The articles will then get sent to the Managing Editor of our community, who will go through a second edit.
After this edit, our articles may be sent back to us to look through again, and do some last minute changes. Then we are ready to publish.
This extensive process reminds me a little bit of from what I understand, a newspaper goes through, writing stories every day for the public. Being the editor, I am managing a team every week to create amazing content, which is such a rewarding experience to have at just 20 years old.
What I especially love about writing and editing for Odyssey is: I get to choose. Every week I make a choice about what I would like to write about, and that is something that often wouldn't happen if you were a journalist for a newspaper.
Odyssey gives you: Individuality, Skills of working with a team of people and the amazing feeling of a published piece.
Not to mention, your team becomes a second family. The support in my community of writers is incredible.
If you love writing, or consider yourself to be a leader and would love to put your ideas out there on a platform through social media to reach an audience that will respond to your works, join today!
An invitation for all: https://muse.theodysseyonline.com/apply
