Sister Chapter Pod: Introducing Bristol

Our Chapter Correspondents are Noa Blane Damelin, final year History student, and Franceska Barnard, second year Law student. Myself, I’m Ella Boyce, a first year student studying English and French, I work as a style editor for the chapter. Our committee consists of ten members and we have twenty-two editors who work on the articles we get sent from contributors. We aim to publish around ten articles a week, we have grown massively over the past two years and are now proud to be a Diamond Chapter of Her Campus!

Our branch strives towards empowerment and equality. We don’t just focus on women’s issues however, as a chapter we often publish articles tackling social justice issues, take for example our recent articles on sustainable fashion and portrayal of mental health. 

We do more than write and publish articles, we also arrange events which raise awareness for various social issues. These events include letter writing sessions, run alongside various organisations such as Amnesty International. Our most recent session being focused towards the issue of incarcerated women’s reproductive rights, run with Howard League Prison Reform Society. The first letter writing activism event was in response to the change in women’s abortion rights in Poland, see the article published after the event here. 

Not only do we run these types of events, but we also run fundraising events throughout the year. Our most recent being a ‘GALentine’s’ event, raising money for Coppafeel (a breast cancer awareness charity). This was a speed dating type event, it allowed people to meet new people. Even though we have been in a national lockdown for months now, we know these types of virtual events allow people to chat with others and hopefully prevent loneliness. 

We are also so lucky to be able to host events with various figures. Our most recent speaker was Myra Ali, a woman of colour journalist with a health condition. She gave some really valuable advice for aspiring journalists, see a recap of her words here. 

We are so lucky to have a fantastic entertainment section who reflect trends in the media. I’d love to say that I have unique taste in what TV shows I watch but I do tend to watch whatever is trending. We often take a twist on shows when writing articles on them and incorporate them into our other sections, articles covering shows such as Riverdale, Bridgeton and It’s a Sin. As per our values of empowerment and equality, we like to use shows that tackle social issues to bring to our platform, Franceska recently wrote an article on sexual harassment and how the issue was tackled in TV show Sex Education, see the article here. 

Now to a bit about University of Bristol. We are lucky to have an enormous range of courses on offer to us, take a browse of the list here. There are many combinations of courses that we can do as well, for example my degree English and French which is a joint-honour degree. This means that the credits I need to pass the year are split equally between the two subjects, rather than a major and minor system. Courses range in length, mine is four years because I will take my third year of studies in a francophone country. Typically undergraduate degrees are three years long. 

I am so lucky to have been appointed style editor for Her Campus Bristol. I would say my favourite moments have been the virtual meetings we do every term. It’s nice to put names to faces, and to chat to people. I also love working with contributors and seeing how they interpret our article ideas and in which direction they take the pieces. It’s very rewarding to read their finished work.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about Her Campus Bristol, and if by any chance you end up in this wonderful city, you have a group of us happy to give you a tour! Até breve!

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