I worked in various positions as a member of the IT Board of Publications, writer for the Minnesota Technolog, and editor of the IT Connection. It was a fun diversion, helped introduce me to the Macintosh, fonts, layout, and thinking like an editor more than I ever had before. The people were fun to hang out with, studying or working on issues, budgets, and the like. We saw Acme Comedy together, and we saw Terminator II together. I thought it was a great learning opportunity. And compared to some organizations, did not require that much time out of class. Being the type that I am though, dedication meant I gave whatever spare time I could to keep things running.
For a while after leaving the University of Minnesota, I wondered if the Technolog and the IT Board of Publications would survive on their own. I had spent a lot of time there, but I was not maybe the best mentor for cultivating and attracting new talent. In years previous it seemed easy to attract talent - it was hard to figure out whom to turn away. In the later years, we had to turn to pizza to keep people showing up.
After I was president of the IT Board of Publications for a year, I wondered who would take the reigns. The Board had a great promoter in Dr. Claussen, who happened to pass away during my years there. Herb Harmisson the IT Placement Director took the sponsor role, though he lacked some of the interest Dr. Claussen had. Too, it was difficult to motivate students to take time away from their studying to come to bi-weekly? meetings. Looking online, I cannot see a history of the publications after 2005, so it looks like it continued for a while at least. Similar magazines, like Wisconsins, Purdue, list here, competed every year for awards from the ECMA - Engineering College Magazine Association.
Going to ECMA meetings once a year was a great way to get out and see other college campuses. The first one I went to was at Howard University which was quite an experience inself in addition to the Capitol tour. In front of the scenery at Fort Collins was where I first went rollerblading. Ohio State had an interesting Capitol - dwarfed by nearby skyscrapers, it made you appreciate the height restrictions in St. Paul, MN. Ithaca was a great college town, and the Gorge in the middle of town was somewhat alarming while walking around after sneaking or not-sneaking into parties underage all night. Of course there were courses on funding and information and discussion groups but mostly I remember the other students.
The colleges tried different means to achieve advertising funding, which seemed to have always been on the downslide. One year a crazy advertising guy got everyone to channel their national accounts through him, but he appeared to fail for several colleges and the organization dropped him.
I can't say for sure what part of my IT experience was spent in the IT Board office which had a huge library of old magazines. Whenever you needed to take a break, you could open an old issue. Somewhere between popular mechanics, and Discover, something with articles for students, graduates, and job seekers, and jokes which varied between offbeat to off color, it was a trip down memory lane with an eye toward just how different the IT culture was back then.
In 1992 or 93 one of the newsletter editors, Tola Marts, a CSci major, mentioned the WWW and how we should develop a new strategy to work with this new technology. We were already using Gopher, but I'm not sure how many people actually ever noticed we were putting old articles/issues out there anyhow.
The University of Minnesota had student service fees to pay for it, which helped since advertising wasn't enough to cover everything. Perhaps that funding dried up. Perhaps it is getting really tough to find editors and writers. It is sad somewhat, since other colleges still have their publications. I hope someday they start up again.
