Journalism Club (C, S)

In 9th Grade I was invited by my classmates to join the journalism club. During that time, the club did not yet exist and it was still in the process of being created. The idea was to create a student run organization that published school news. 

After making some demonstrations of potential designs for the website I was set in charge of creating and operating the website. Various teams were also assembled to collect, write, edit and publish stories. By the time we had finished organizing the structure of the club, we had some ideas for stories we wanted to report and had delegated some tasks in order to make it happen. However, due to major breakdowns in communication, a lack of understanding of responsibilities, general confusion and directionlessness, no fruit to our labor had managed to be harvested and the club never got to release any website or publish a single story and died out by the time I finished 9th Grade. While there were plans to re-attempt a launch in Grade 10, they were never seriously implemented. 

I learnt so much from my time in this club, especially thanks to hindsight. Firstly during the actually club, I was for the first time having to create a website for a purpose other than a class activity, and one that was intended for a mass audience. I had to think about the design of the website so as to make it easy to navigate, and be neatly organized so that people could find any older story with less hassle. I had to find ways to develop the website in such a way so that all the latest stories would be featured, and so on. The fall of the club also served as an important lesson in the importance of management and organization of a team / organization. I saw first hand what happens to a good idea with a poorly communicated and organized team. I saw how constraint arguing / disagreements within the team constantly slowed things down. From that I got the seeds of how to become a good leader that would help me later on; I may not have known what to do before that, but, after that, I know what not to do, and looking back now, that was much more impactful.