Describe your project:
I served as a Communications and Content Strategy Fellow at The Yale Review. The position entailed managing the magazine’s social media platforms, creating promotional copy, developing content strategy with the social media team for forthcoming issues and digital releases, publishing archival pieces online, and tracking and reporting on user analytics to senior editorial staff members.
What are the main skills that you acquired?
In my role at TYR, I developed technical, as well as transferrable skills. On the technical side, I definitely benefitted from the chance to craft original content and promotional copy, and to analyze the magazine’s social media analytics. In terms of transferrable skills, I gained experience with project management, teamwork, and communications. TYR also provides excellent additional professionalization events for its fellows, including talks with experts and editorial workshops.
What were the biggest challenges and learning opportunities of the fellowship?
The Yale Review has recently adopted a new editorial direction under the leadership of Meghan O’Rourke, with whom it was truly wonderful to work. As part of the magazine’s relaunch, TYR has pivoted to a digital platform and is in the process of cultivating its social media presence and an online community of readers. This is an exciting period of change for the magazine and, as such, enabled me to really work on growing the magazine’s online presence from the ground up. Having a voice in the process and the freedom to try new things was fantastic! At the same time, since I came into the position as somewhat of a novice, there was a steep learning curve. At first, this felt pretty intimidating, especially since the fellow role was of a fairly limited duration. In the end, working with a short turnaround and lots of new material was a great learning opportunity, from which I feel I greatly benefitted!
Thank you to the GPE Fellowship organizers (s/o to OCS’s Molly Grun and Hyun Ja Shin!) and its sponsors for creating this fantastic initiative for Yale PhD students. I am also grateful to Meghan O’Rourke and Andy Heisel for all the support along the way!
