Seeking creative outlet, students launch webzine

Creative writing, poetry, music and painting-these are all things that are seldom associated with campus life. Classes often require technical writing or drafting, but students rarely get the opportunity to creatively express themselves in an open forum.

A group of students set out to create something new that would provide not only a creative outlet, but would also create a stronger sense of community within their department. After working long and hard, the students of the ECE department recently released the first issue of a brand new webzine called ecesis, which can be found online at www.ece.gatech.edu/ecesis.

Ecesis means the successful establishment of an organism in a new environment. The students chose this name after sorting through close to 70 different suggestions ranging from the technical to the humorous.

“[The name] seemed to embody what we were trying to do,” said Christina Bourgeois, one of the faculty advisors for ecesis.

The evolution of ecesis began several years ago when Bourgeois first started working in the ECE department. Her job allowed her to spend a great deal of time interacting with the students and helping them with their technical writing and oral presentation assignments. Through this work, she realized that the students were very creative writers, musicians, and artists. Last summer, Bourgeois began to ask around to gauge the student response to her idea for a creative outlet designed solely for ECE students, staff and alumni.

After she received many positive responses, she approached Dr. Jeff Davis and asked if the ECE Student Faculty Committee would be interested in co-sponsoring the project. After getting his support, Bourgeois set up an informal meeting to entice students to participate in the project. Students were very receptive to the idea and before long there were regular meetings and an editorial board consisting completely of students.

At first, the ecesis board planned to accept and publish all submissions so the webzine would be a noncompetitive creative outlet for anyone within the department of 1900 undergrads, 1000 grads, 115 tenured or tenure-track faculty and 300 staff members. However, the community response was much larger than anyone expected since the board received more than 100 submissions.

“Many students were apathetic at first, but now they have seen the first issue and think it is really cool,” said Bourgeois.

This means that the board can probably expect to see many more submissions to the Spring 2005 issue. In fact, submissions have already started coming in. In order to handle the large number of submissions for the next issue, the editorial staff is now thinking about adding a competitive element that includes first, second and third place prizes for the best submissions.

Since one of the main goals of ecesis was to help build a stronger sense of community within the department, the project needed to involve more than just a publication.

One of the ways the whole ECE community was involved in the project was through the launch party. The board invited everyone that they selected for publication to attend the launch party and to perform. They could discuss their work, read their poetry or play their music. Fifteen students accepted the invitation and for two hours on April 19 students preformed in a small space designed to promote interaction among the audience.

The party was open and allowed student to come and go whenever they wanted. Over 200 people stopped by during the two hours to enjoy the performances. Since the launch was so successful, next year, while there will not be a launch party, there will be a similar forum for student to perform their works.

“I found out that it was a unique opportunity to help develop a sense of community that is severely lacking in most engineering departments,” said Chris Alvino, a graduate Electrical and Computer Engineering student and co-editor for the prose section. “You can work really hard for weeks or even months, but it is hard to do for years in a place where you are not happy.”

Many other students echoed this sentiment and said that they thought the whole project was very successful in its goals of creating a closer community.

Ecesis also succeeded in its goal of becoming a creative outlet for ECE students. The quality of the submissions surprised many members of the editorial board. “It’s a great way for students to express their creativity, which sometimes goes overlooked when getting bogged down in purely technical classes and labs,” said Samantha Swafford, a recent Electrical Engineering graduate and the co-editor of the film section.

Some students said the submissions were excellent, though another said that he was used to creative works from schools that focused more on liberal arts and that Tech’s submissions didn’t compare.