What I Built at Prospect Journal (And What Happened After I Left)

I joined Prospect Journal of International Affairs at UC San Diego in fall 2020, became Director of Marketing almost immediately, and was appointed Editor-in-Chief within my first year — largely because I was the only one who wanted to do both jobs at once. I held the EIC and Director of Marketing and Media roles simultaneously through June 2023. This is a reflection on what that actually looked like.

Prospect Journal of International Affairs was, when I joined it in fall 2020, exactly what most student academic journals are: a publication that produced thoughtful written work, published it online, and then largely hoped people would find it. The social media presence was minimal. The brand was undefined in that particular way student organizations often are — not bad exactly, just unconsidered. The multimedia dimension did not exist.

I became Director of Marketing almost immediately, which tells you something about either my enthusiasm or the competition for the role. Probably both. Within another year I had taken on the Editor-in-Chief position as well, which I held simultaneously with the marketing and media directorship until June 2023. Running both sides of a publication at once is not something I would describe as relaxing, but it gave me something I genuinely valued: complete visibility into how editorial decisions and audience strategy connect, and the authority to make them align.

The editorial side was the more straightforward of the two. Prospect published peer-reviewed academic work on international affairs — the kind of rigorous, sourced, footnoted writing that graduate students and advanced undergraduates produce when they're taking a subject seriously. That didn't change under my tenure and shouldn't have. What I did was add range. A journal that only publishes long-form academic papers has one register, one audience, one mode of engagement. International affairs is not a subject that benefits from that kind of narrowness.

So we built multimedia. Field reports — short, reported pieces from students with direct experience in or connection to specific regions or issues. Documentaries produced by the team: one on international students at UCSD, examining what it actually meant to navigate an American university as a foreign national; one on the diversity of food cultures on campus, which sounds lighter but turned into a genuinely interesting piece about identity and belonging. We did "stop and debate" segments on the campus walkway — picking deliberately polarizing low-stakes topics like Star Wars allegiances, getting people to engage in real argument, filming it. The point was to demonstrate that international affairs thinking — the habit of examining sides, weighing evidence, arguing in good faith — is applicable to everything, not just geopolitics. And that a journal can have a sense of humor about itself.

The rebrand was the thing I'm most proud of aesthetically. The visual identity became intentional: a coherent palette, consistent typography, a digital presence that looked like something someone had actually designed rather than assembled. Instagram engagement increased, readership went up forty percent, and we brought in more staff — partly because the organization looked like somewhere worth joining.

I left in June 2023. The year or two after I left, the brand degraded in the way things sometimes do when the person holding them together moves on. More recently, from what I've seen, they've done their own rebrand and pulled things back together, which I think is genuinely good — the journal matters and should look like it does.

What I took from it was less about journalism specifically and more about what it means to build something with limited resources and no real institutional support. A student journal runs on volunteer time, borrowed enthusiasm, and the occasional miracle of finding someone who can both edit a paper on Southeast Asian trade policy and also think about Instagram strategy. When those people exist, you hold onto them. When they don't, you become them.

I became them. It was worth it (for the most part).