For students, gaining a foothold in the academic world can be a seemingly-impossible endeavour. While many of us take our degrees seriously and even aspire towards further progression into academia, it’s difficult to know where to start, resulting in the figurative feeling of being like a goldfish trying to swim into a large ocean already populated by much more important sharks and whales. It is this very difficulty that the existence of student academic journals seek to combat, leading me to speak to members of the editorial team from Polyphony, Juncture, and Manchester Historian to hear more about the role that student academic journals fill.
Chief in this role is, of course, allowing students the opportunity to publish academic work that would otherwise go slightly remiss. When I spoke to Juncture‘s general secretary, Ella, she emphasised that “the most important thing is the fact that students spend so much time on this work […] and I think a lot of people feel that it can be really difficult to get recognition […] I think it’s nice to get to share work that you feel really proud of with the rest of the university and with your coursemates”.
A similar notion of personal pride was echoed by Polyphony’s team, as Campbell, the journal’s editor-in-chief, noted that “to have your work published, just for the first time […] is just a huge milestone”. “To have something to show from your time studying English Literature, or American Studies, at Manchester, other than the piece of paper that your degree’s on, is just really nice”.
Alternatively to Polyphony and Juncture‘s approaches to publishing, Manchester Historian allows students to submit articles they have written independently about history, rather than submitting essays from their classes. The co-editors stated this approach was intended to allow students to engage on a more personal level with history, as Agnes, one of the co-editors behind the Historian, affirmed that “it’s a nicer thing for people to be able to write their own work […] rather than just rehashing something they’ve already submitted”. Sam, another of the co-editors, described this system as an “outlet for students” to approach the broadness of history: “it’s just a great platform for students to kind of try their hands”.
This more relaxed approach to academic writing was highlighted to me as a system that grants students more freedom from what is prescribed for them from their courses, allowing them to express themselves. Sam stated that “you can kind of express something that’s […] been on the fringes of your interest in a new way that lets you write something you wouldn’t normally write” within the typical university course. When discussing this approach, Sam also made mention of the Historian‘s lack of a style guide or referencing system, stating that, with this “more casual” style, “I think it allows you to kind of write something that you’re semi-interested in”.
With the recurrent theme of platforming student expression, the importance and difficulty of preserving the voice of an article or essay arose as a common theme among these interviews. While Polyphony has a style guide they use in order to ensure that every piece of published work is of high quality and to maintain a certain standard, Redmond, the team’s deputy Editor-in-Chief, was keen to assure me, “even in standard essays, we tend to edit quite sparingly”. Campbell likewise established that the purpose of editing is to ensure “it’s a professionally published piece of work […] but also making sure that you’re able to preserve what the person is trying to say and how they’re saying it”.
Polyphony‘s typical style guide is also eschewed when editing creative writing pieces, because, according to Campbell, “it’s more to do with the author’s individual voice and style”, resulting in a “more collaborative” style of editing involving more communication with the author.
Likewise, after listing the “quite extensive” editing guidelines that are followed within Juncture, Ella also ended her statement by reassuring me that “it is guidelines, rather than […] strict rules”.
Conversely, the Historian does not follow any sort of style guide; while I was a little surprised by this at first, Agnes reassured me that this was for the purpose of preserving their writers’ voices: “Obviously, within reason. If there’s […] something [that] grammatically doesn’t make sense, or there’s just a huge inaccuracy, then that gets changed. But, as much as we can, we like to keep it as faithful to what people have written as possible”.
The lack of style guide was also stressed as a means of making the publication’s works accessible, as Agnes commented that the Historian is “a newspaper [trying] to broaden students’ understanding of history in a very accessible way […] it’s very important for people to understand the history that came before them”.
The process of editing is seemingly a lengthy but important process for each of these publications, as their members described their respective pipelines to me in great detail. Notably, Kacey, Polyphony‘s General Secretary, informed me that editors on Polyphony‘s team will follow the same essays they initially read blind through the processes of being accepted, edited, and published. The resultant effect of this process is that editors tend to get attached to their essays, as Redmond commented “you feel a bit of an attachment to an essay; you read it, and you — if you really love it — you advocate for it to be published”.
As a result of these editing processes, the recurrent thread of personal development and the opportunity to develop specific skill sets repeatedly arose. Ella made mention of the routine meetings that Juncture holds, each of which compel members of the team to speak up and become more active contributors: “It’s a very […] discussion-heavy room, and […] you have to contribute”.
Likewise, Agnes emphasised the communication and collaboration skills that are gained both by those who submit their articles to the team, and by those who work on the team itself: “You do so much communicating, and you have to be so open to working with other people […] and I think that’s never a skill that’s going to be bad to develop”.
With the team from the Historian having mentioned that these same skills look good on a CV, the inevitable concern around employability also arose as a recurrent theme within these interviews — as Ella put it, “that’s the obvious one that comes to a lot of people’s minds” when asked about the personal importance of student academic journals. The editors I spoke to often noted the difficulty of being published in regular journals, making student academic journals a natural component for those looking to progress into academia. Ella also mentioned that the process of submitting to the journal increases the student’s understanding of the “processes […] for academic journals and academic writing”.
On this subject, Kacey emphasised that “as English students […] the employability services can be a bit lacking […] the most important thing when people graduate is that they feel confident in themselves to walk into an interview room, and […] if you’ve been through this process, if you’ve submitted an application […] the forms of feedback you receive are nudges into building that confidence that graduates really struggle with”.
This seemed particularly true for students completing humanities degrees, as culture-based careers and degrees alike can often seem under threat; Redmond commented on the recent nationwide closing of English departments across British universities and said that “being able to actually highlight the brilliant work these people are doing […] and the breadth of the English degree […] I think it’s really important to highlight that there’s real value to this degree”.
This breadth is another element that these journals seemed keen to showcase. When I asked if there have been any recurrent trends in the writing they’ve received, the team from the Historian noted that they’ve recently received more histories of the present day, as their co-editor Katia stated that, for a history-based publication that provides writing prompts for every period of history, “we tend to get articles that have relevancy in our day-to-day lives in some sense”.
Likewise, the Polyphony team concurred that they received a very broad range of essays, as Campbell noted that they would even receive multiple entirely opposing essays that were submitted for the same question, although the team also noted that certain courses often had a higher submission rate than others — particularly those focussed on medieval fiction. The team did conclude that this was likely due to a higher level of promotion that they have received within certain classes, a sentiment that was echoed by the Historian‘s co-editors too, who highlighted to me the need for further promotional material in order to make students aware of the opportunities they offer.
Of course, no student journal would function without submissions, which seem to have been dwindling in recent years for some of these publications despite each journal’s openness to submissions. Ella explained to me that Juncture is open to submissions from any student willing to write about politics regardless of their degree or the mark their essay received given the universality of politics across almost every subject, yet Juncture has been struggling to find submissions for this past year.
Given the evident benefits of involving oneself with student academic publishing, with Katia describing the process as being “a great opportunity […] but also just a lovely experience”, you might want to consider sending in one of those essays you’re proud of but have nobody to show; who knows, it might just get published.
