I can’t really believe it. This semester isn’t just over, college is over. I graduated! I earned a degree from the Missouri School of Journalism. I completed two capstones. I managed three different positions within the university. I didn’t do any of it alone, but I did it!

I’ve been part of a lot of really cool team efforts this year. Along with three other amazing women, I helped transition the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Peer Educators program from advisor-led to student-led. We picked out our replacements and everything, so we know the future is bright.

This semester at The Missouri Review, two of the manuscripts that I pitched from my slush pile were accepted for publication. It’s super cool that they were pieces I had the first read on, but if other readers hadn’t seen what I did on their consecutive reads, I probably would have sent the essays right back to the authors. And now they’re going to be in the magazine!

Every week with about 30 journalism students, I help create content for VoxTalk, the blog for Vox Magazine. They pitch, I accept, they write, I edit. And every week with 14 journalism students (a couple of whom are also bloggers for VoxTalk), I learn more about grammar in the class I’m a teaching assistant for (for which I’m a teaching assistant, get off my back), Magazine Editing.

But one of my favorite joint ventures this semester was Meridian. In Magazine Publishing, the capstone class for the Publishing and Management track in the Magazine Journalism sequence (whew!), students are broken up into teams to work on magazine prototypes for the entire semester. I was unbelievable excited about my team and our concept from week one. Our magazine was a combination of literature and lifestyle content for women in their 20s and 30s. We created this concept for a locally rooted but worldly minded woman. What we mean by this is that our reader is invested in her community, loves where she’s from and is eager to learn about the world around her.

Basically, our feature well is full of fiction, nonfiction, profiles and general longform writing, and our departments are made up of different lifestyle categories (style, entertainment, reviews, etc.). Our amazing designer based the aesthetic of our magazine off German publications she’d come across, and at the end of a long semester of writing, editing, planning and dreaming, we came up with the coolest magazine I’ve ever seen. We had contributing artists and a contributing poet, we had beautiful illustrations and stories, we had a business plan and advertising strategy, and we had an incredible magazine that brought intelligent content to young women who craved it.

At the end of the semester, all of the magazine groups bring their concepts to Meredith Corporation in Des Moines, Iowa, to present their prototypes. This presentation was the culmination of all of our work. We left Columbia at 4 a.m. to get there in time, and I didn’t sleep the whole way because I was too nervous and excited. My group presented around 10 a.m.

They hated it. After we finished our presentation, the Meredith execs grilled us on the finances, said our mission was muddled, insisted that nobody was interested in reading literature and that our magazine was, overall, “ambitiously schizophrenic.” It was hard to hear. We went back to our seats feeling pretty defeated. We listened to the rest of the presentations and went on a tour of the offices, and at the very very end of the day, one last executive came into the room. She said she was disappointed she hadn’t been able to hear the presentations, but looking through them, she was very impressed. “I especially loved this one,” she said. “This one was so cool and fresh.” She was holding up Meridian.

After the day was over, our whole group flocked over to her. She totally loved it. She said it was unlike anything she’d ever seen, she thought the design was super cool, and she knew there were women who would want to read it. She saw in our magazine everything we believed in. And she gave us some great advice. Not everyone’s going to like what you do; not everyone’s going to get it. All you can do is what’s right. That can mean a lot of different things, and it applies differently to every situation, but it’s the truest thing there is.

This adventure was the perfect sendoff into postgrad life. We made something beautiful, and we were heavily critiqued. All of the flaws of our labor of love were laid bare in front of us. And we connected with someone. We found our reader, and we continue to find readers with each new person who gushes over our prototype. We all felt a little lost when the semester ended and our magazine didn’t live on. One of our sister prototypes, Fangirl, is being produced online as part of a graduate project. We were pretty bummed that ours couldn’t continue in the same way, but man, are we proud of what we made.

If you want to check it out, we have an online version of our print prototype!