Editors Letter
I want to first introduce the magazine that I created for my senior capstone project by discussing my experience working on the Obama campaign. I began working on the Barack Obama reelection campaign in the fall of 2012. I have always been an incredibly opinionated person, which certainly extends to my political beliefs, but found myself lost when it came to the recent election cycle. I believed so much in what Barack Obama stood for, but was not sure how exactly I could express these beliefs because I was under the legal age to vote in the United States. I began volunteering at my local reelection office on a whim and soon found it to be a way around all of my frustrations.
Volunteering gave me a way to cast my election ballot without physically doing so and affect the decisions of hundreds of other voters. By the time the election cycle was over I had completed over 250 hours of service and been appointed an Organizing Fellow at my regional office. I knew that I wanted to share my experiences and all that I learned working on the campaign with students at SLA through my capstone project, but was not sure of which facet I should examine more thoroughly.
My first plan was to talk about the technical skills and general campaign structure I learned from my work. I found Jim Messina’s (Obama’s national field director) campaign strategy fascinating, especially the extremely complicated math and data that drove the grass roots organizing. I had a plan to write a research paper on this topic and what components were used to help Obama win the election. This idea stuck for a large part of the year until I realized that focusing on a specific aspect of the campaign was not going to give the work I completed justice. While I did learn about data collection and voter turnout, these are not the things that come to mind when I think about my time as a Fellow. What really sticks out to me about my experience, and why my time on the campaign was so special, was that I was able to explore something I was truly passionate about and invested in for the first time in my life. I also learned how better to collaborate with others and organize people around a specific cause. These are the experiences that I wanted to bring back to SLA with me.
The creation of my magazine and everything that it stands for is directly related to the time I spent on the Obama campaign. I wanted to give students a platform to write about topics that they genuinely care about and have a passion for. The pieces of work that I revived from students are both varied in length and subject matter, but come together to create a very well rounded magazine. I also used almost 100% student photographs in the magazine in order to display other mediums of their talent.
Please enjoy the following articles and all of the work that was put
into them. I can not thank the authors enough for all of their contrib-
utions and hard work.
Callie Monroe