As Chair of the Public Relations (PR) Committee of the Student Government Association (SGA), one of my primary responsibilities is making posters. Although that may seem like a relatively simple task, you’d be surprised by how much time and thought it takes to craft the perfect poster. I often ask myself, Do these colors go together?, Is the font legible?, Is this too cheesy?, Is this centered?, and so on. Then, after staring at my poster for 30 minutes and losing the capacity to properly assess its visual and textual elements, I proceed to ask others if my poster draft is presentable.
I have made so many posters at this point that my Canva account has several pages of posters. To be fair, I have made posters for other clubs, but 95% of my creations are for the SGA.
Recently, however, I have been facing some poster-making difficulties. Particularly, I have been facing a creative crisis in regard to designing a poster for the SGA’s Committee on Academic Rights (CAR). Throughout the semester, CAR has worked diligently to create an Academic Concern Form through which students can address serious academic concerns that they have not been able to resolve independently. The form would then allow for students to collaborate with the Office of Undergraduate Academics and solve their issue. For instance, if you ask a professor about something and they give you a hard time and won’t work with you, you can then fill out the Academic Concern Form and coordinate the best course of action with guidance from Undergraduate Academics. Essentially, the form aims to provide students with more channels of communication and to serve as a team approach to solving problems on campus.
Now, how on earth am I supposed to fit all of that intricate verbiage onto a poster? I decided to try to advertise this useful resource and ended up concocting three different versions of an Academic Concern Form poster. There was a common theme throughout my posters: where to find the form (on my.stevens.edu) and examples of when to fill out the form.
However, my original word choice made the Academic Concern Form seem like it existed as a catch-all and blamed any non-student party. Needless to say, those posters were never printed. The posters were so aesthetically pleasing, but they sit in my Canva account as the text and message of each one is debated. I am living in a self-inflicted PR nightmare as I struggle to find the right words, words that will be accurate, not too complex and long-winded, and will make everyone happy.
Hopefully, my new set of posters for the Academic Concern Form will be approved so that an achievement of SGA’s Committee on Academic Rights can be properly promoted and used to help the student body. Then, perhaps, I can wake up from my nightmare just in time to make the third TEDx poster for whenever the talk and concurrent SGA live streaming is rescheduled. But that whole perpetual date change is a different PR hurdle.
Despite the occasional craziness, I love being PR Chair for the SGA, and I don’t know who I’d be without my poster-making hobby. Because let’s be real, even if you don’t know me personally, you’ve probably seen one of my posters, and that means I’m doing my job.
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