Over 80 schools across the country have one. Even UNC has one. Now because of the action of a handful of students, N.C. State has one. Kristie Demers, a junior in English, spearheaded the creation of HerCampus.com/NCSU, a site run by — and for — University students.
“We try to make it something that we would want to read,” Demers said.
According to Demers, the site was founded Sept. 7 last year. Since that time, a core staff of eight students has joined her in creating articles for the site.
“We just think of topics that are interesting to the women at State, and the guys, but we try to focus on the women more since it is HerCampus,” Demers said. “We just want to have witty, personalized information whether it’s news, beauty, lifestyle or anything like that.”
“We do a lot of college topics,” Justine Blanc-Laine said. Blanc-Laine, a junior in business administration, is the group’s primary photographer. “[We’ve written about] partying, studying, we’ve covered more serious topics like rape [and] how to handle situations with your friends. We have campus events on the site so you know about simple things like thank-a-teacher. We just want to make people aware and have a new perspective.”
Current topics on the site include New Year’s resolution recommendations, coverage of the Mr. Engineer pageant, workout suggestions for Carmichael Gymnasium and many others.
In addition, HerCampus serves as a way for the writers to let their fellow students know about small businesses in the area.
“Just getting the word out about things that people don’t normally hear about,” Demers said. “It’s really rewarding.”
Kara Schmieg, a junior in communications, likes to apply her creative writing skills at HerCampus’s blog called “HerVoice.”
“I’m a creative writer, not so much a journalist,” Schmieg said. “I feel like that’s the best way to express myself.”
“I think we’re doing a great job of getting our names out there, writing what we want to write, and saying what we want to say,” Anna Whaley, a sophomore in public relations, said. “There are over 35,000 students here, and you don’t want to get lost in the shuffle all the time. I wanted to try and get involved and be a part of something that was going to get bigger.”
The group of writers is growing. According to Demers, there are currently between 8 and 11 writers, and four more who want to help and are in the process of writing their first articles.
“We have been publishing seven or eight articles a week for the past four months,” Demers said. “I tried printing them all so I’d have a hard copy of all of them, but I quit because I was using so much paper.”
While the site’s content is targeted toward the female population, men contribute to the site as well, according to Demers.
“HerCampus does have a real-live college guy blog writer who writes every single week,” Demers said. “He’s an adamant snowboarder, a manly-man guy and he loves to write about relationships and anything on campus, what he likes to do … I keep having guys coming out of the woodwork asking ‘do you need any contributing writers? Do you need anything?’ Girls like the guy perspective.”
According to Demers, she got the idea to create the site last summer.
“I was browsing online this summer and typed in something about decorating college dorms and a HerCampus article came up,” Demers said. “I was like, ‘Where’s the N.C. State branch?’ and I found out we didn’t have one yet. So I wanted to open one up and let girls here have the same idea … I just wanted to bring another form of media because I love writing and a lot of journalists here would be interested in that.”
According to Demers, none of the writers or photographers are paid.
“We volunteer our time, effort and own money in order to promote HerCampus NCSU and bring it to life,” Demers said. Demers plans to apply to make HerCampus a University-recognized student organization in the near future, and to apply for funding through the University’s appropriations process. As of last December, the site had received 10,000 page views, according to Demers.
Articles from other schools’ HerCampus sites and the national site have been published in Seventeen and The Huffington Post, according to Demers.
“Uploading everything to the website takes at least two hours if I have all the articles from everyone,” Demers said. “Then you have to find pictures, make it the right format and get everything situated. It takes a lot of time, but it’s really rewarding. People come out saying ‘this looked awesome,’ or, ‘I’m proud of what you’re doing.’ I see people on campus who are like, ‘hey, you’re that girl who does the HerCampus articles, aren’t you?'”
