Letting Creativity Flourish with Atramento Journalism Club
Always stay grounded,
With your personality well rounded,
Emerge from middle school stronger and braver,
With experiences and memories to savor.
- Snippet from ‘A New Stage Is About To Begin’ by Adira Rajesh​
Atramento Journalism Club is a student-led extra-curricular activity (ECA) here at BIS HCMC Secondary Campus, offering a platform for our students to express their creativity, be it through words, photography or art. We caught up with Atramentos's two Editors-in-Chief Alyssa Yap and Tue Minh Nguyen to find out more about the club and how we can keep up-to-date with their latest publications...
What’s the aim of Atramento Journalism Club?
Atramento, which means ‘ink’ in Latin aims to encourage budding writers, photographers, or artists to pursue their interests and let their creativity flourish through producing and publishing their articles, photography or art at Atramento.
What types of pieces are written?
Atramento is a creative school journalism magazine so it focuses on student interest and as student leaders, we try our best to accommodate and adjust to students’ interests. Currently, we have:
- a Creative Writing section for short stories, diary entries and poetry
- an Entertainment section for film/book reviews
- a Travel section for travel recommendations or travel accounts
- a Photography section for photos taken by the students
- a Blog which can be accessed on the site and aims to be about school life.
Who can submit articles?
We’re open to submissions from students in Years 7 to 13. We accept submissions even from students not signed up to the club because we want to encourage everyone to be involved, even those who may not have time for the club slot in their ECAs but want to express their creative skills!
Describe the club in 3 words!
- Diverse - we try our best to produce a wide variety of work by students ranging from film reviews to poetry
- Creative - we encourage our contributors - photographers and writers - to produce work from their interests in their own style of writing
- Student-oriented - we are a club that is led and made up of writers and artists from Years 7 through 13 who have the rest of the BIS school population as the main target audience.
What skills are you learning through being involved in this club?
- Organisation - ensuring that the magazine is published on time with enough work to present to readers. It also helps us to make sure that everyone has played their part so it gives us a sense of discipline.
- Coordination/Planning - as student leaders, we learn to work with a deadline in mind and we plan and coordinate with each other so that the editing process is delegated equally
- Creativity! This is obviously needed by all members to be able to produce work for the magazine.
Where can we see the work published?
Our first publication can be read online and in printed format in English classrooms or in the library and all other publications (first one included) can be accessed through our website: http://atramento.weebly.com/
We are working on publishing alerts through our Facebook page so please hit ‘like’ to keep up to date with the latest work from our journalists: https://www.facebook.com/atramentoBIS
What are your plans for the future of Atramento?
The Atramento BIS Journalism Club started about 3 years ago and we are looking for more ways to encourage the rest of the student body to participate and develop the club and the magazine. We’re planning on offering workshops to help students with their writing. This will either be through online workshops or a guest speaker to provide a short talk.
Ultimately we are interested in making the magazine more interactive and student-focused in terms of the interest and variety that is being presented so we hope to see more students from this term onwards to contribute and share ideas on how to make the Journalism Club a real addition to school life.
