Closing Time

Kelly Lynch  //  April 30, 2012

Well, it’s the very last day in April, 2012, and this has a few implications for Symmetry. Firstly, it means we’ve been running for about 8 months now. Secondly, it means we will as of May 1st be on hiatus until the fall. In our business proposal, we declared that Symmetry would run from September to April. We did this because we want to sit back, take a huge, raggedy, deep breath, let it out, and say, “Okay. How did we do?”

I can tell you a little about it right now:

The first day Symmetry launched, we had 1,664 hits to the website. On the first day. Adam Sterling had to pick my jaw up off the floor and throw it over my shoulder because it was not getting re-attached any time soon. Wow, is all I can say, even in retrospect. You guys are awesome.

We have published 116 articles (this will be 117). About 90 per cent of those are student-written. Fabulously student-written. I think the website speaks for itself, but the talent, the ingenuity, the passion, and the work ethic of the Mount’s Public Relations students is radiant here. Thank-you, from the bottom of my heart, to everyone who sent something in. It’s not easy to find time in our hectic, hectic lives to sit down and write an article in the small amount of free time we may have. But many of you did anyway. Some of you multiple times. It’s not easy to put your work out there, especially when you know a large portion of your peers are going to be reading it, that a (possible) stranger will be editing it. It takes courage, and it takes talent, and to all my writers, you have those in spades.

As a side-note: please come back and write for me in the fall. Pretty please with a media release on top?

On average, we have 111 views a day – and that’s just an average. This. Is. Phenomenal. Engagement is absolutely key when we have something like this, and knowing that, when I post an article, a whole bunch of people take time to read it? Well, it just tickles my fancy, let me tell you.

Overall, in 8 month’s time, we have had 17,976 views on the website. Not too shabby for our first go, if I do say so myself.

So, pretty much what I’m saying here is: Way to go, everyone. Obviously this publication couldn’t exist without your submissions and your support.

Let’s do it all again in September, but this time, let’s do it better.

If anyone would like to contribute suggestions for improvements, you can either email them to me or comment on this post. I don’t think of Symmetry as mine and the team’s, I think of it as ours – as belonging to the PR students, Communications Department faculty, and the professionals in the Halifax community who read and contribute. So any suggestions you have will be more than duly considered, and I would love to hear them. Brainstorming is an important part of creativity, and I want to constantly better Symmetry until I have graduated and left it to some industrious soul. Create. Communicate. Collaborate. I stand by our mantra – and so should you.

I would also like to especially thank Professor Crystal Garrett and Professor Brent King for being extremely helpful this year. They were our mentors the past 8 months and provided valuable input when we were trying to figure this whole thing out. Crystal and I also worked together to design a class assignment wherein students in her Persuasive Writing class wrote articles for Symmetry. I encourage more professors to think about doing a similar project with their students. It has churned out some impressive results, and has allowed students to write for an actual publication, and therefore an actual audience. This is my appeal to you.

In general, the faculty deserve a huge round of applause and thanks – not only was the idea for Symmetry almost instantly embraced, it was greatly encouraged and supported the whole way through. There ain’t no faculty like the PR faculty. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks to Ben Boudreau of Yelp, Laura Melanson of Red Balloon Relations, Denise Doucet-Arsenault of ACOA, and Alison DeLory especially for lending her beautiful writing talents and for being so engaged with Symmetry. It is my hope that in the coming year, we see more professionals from the community sharing their knowledge with those of us who are still students.

Thanks to Melissa and Em for always being there for me, for being great co-editors and friends. Thanks to Adam Sterling, also a great friend, whose incredible web design talents have made us as pretty and as functional as we are today (and whom without, I would have forgotten my passwords for everything entirely, always).

Finally, thank-you to everyone for not sending me any angry Letters to the Editor. I was a little terrified I’d get something, but I didn’t! I will take this as secret assent that you like everything we did this year, hooray! I should just change this section to Letters from the Editor. All I do in it is write crazy thank-you notes to you wonderful human beings.

If anyone has any ideas they’d like to share, please, again, feel free to email, text (if you are so privileged to have my digits), tweet, Facebook, stop me in the halls, or comment on the thread. If you want to write something for the fall, myself, Melissa, and Emily are all happy to brainstorm with you.

It’s been an amazing 8 months, and indeed an amazing learning experience for me. It wasn’t always easy (in fact sometimes it was downright difficult), but I think we’ve come far from our original business proposal, and that we can make the publication even bigger and better our next round. Have a great summer.