The Auburn Circle is Auburn University’s student-run literary magazine. Published once each semester, The Auburn Circle features student-created work, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, graphic design, and more.
For two years, I was editor-in-chief of the Auburn Circle, which was crucial in forming my identity as a worker. Because of the wide variety of jobs I had to perform on a daily basis to keep The Auburn Circle running smoothly, I was constantly having to adapt to any given situation. Running The Auburn Circle required adaptability, dynamic thinking, problem solving, and above all, creativity; there is not a single solution that fixes every problem
You can view the issues of the Auburn Circle I edited here:
Leader
The Auburn Circle is a completely student-run organization, and it was my job as the head of the organization to make sure it succeeded. To do this, I wore many hats. But the one I wore most often was that of leader. For the magazine to run smoothly, I had to successfully manage a staff of 21 people, which was comprised of seven departments. This management took many forms. However, the form that I used most often, and the one that I personally consider the most important, is communication. I constantly communicated with my staff through a variety of channels, including face-to-face meetings, emails, and mass text messaging services, in order to keep the magazine on track. This clear communication of my expectations motivated my staff to meet their deadlines, and they did not miss one during my tenure. In addition to keeping my staff on track, it was also my job as the leader of the organization to coordinate the events that we hosted throughout the year, the most important of which was distribution. Every semester, I directed efforts to distribute 3,500 copies of the magazine. During my time as editor-in-chief of The Auburn Circle, we achieved a 100% distribution rate.
Editor
As the job title suggests, another hat that I wore in order to make The Auburn Circle successful was that of editor. Though I love copy editing, my job as editor-in-chief was much larger than checking the grammar and spelling of the pieces we published. My main job as editor was to determine what would be included in each issue of the magazine based on the suggestions of my section editors. This task was often the most difficult part of my job, as we received far more submissions than we could ever publish in 80 pages. Therefore, I made my decisions based on the tone that I wanted to establish for that semester's issue. This task required a lot of creativity, as I was forced to make connections between hundreds of disparate submissions so that we could create a single, cohesive magazine.
Designer
The most fun part of my job as editor-in-chief of The Auburn Circle, and the one that used the most of my creative energy, was designing the magazine using Adobe InDesign CS 5.5. The design process was twofold. I began by working with my section editors to lay out the pages for their specific sections. Together, we designed the spreads for their sections, pairing prose and poetry with photographs and artwork in such a way that the image enhanced the written work and vice versa. Once the section editors designed their respective pages, my real work as designer began. I took the separate spreads my section editors and I created and molded them into one magazine. With the variety of submissions we received each semester, it was often difficult to lay out the pages in such a way that made logical sense. However, with some creative ingenuity, each semester I was able to design a single, cohesive magazine.