“And we told her to submit it, and she never did, and my heart is still a little bit broken.”

With the abundance of campus magazines, there’s certainly no shortage of outlets for student creativity. And more seem to be cropping up all the time.

For instance, this is the inaugural year for Blueprint, which is set to publish its first issue at the end of the month. As an Engineering student, Perng took notice of the many creative writing contests that were offered to engineers and wanted to establish an annual outlet for such works. It was also, he said, partially to buck the common misconception of the engineering community as a noncreative environment.

“I don’t think that many people think that engineers are actually interested in literary arts,” he said. “It’d be useful for the rest of the community to see the kind of creativity, when it comes to literary arts, that Engineering students share.”

When Perng saw how other established programs like ArtsEngine and the IDEA Institute were already bringing together different North Campus denizens through a focus on the creative arts, he decided to expand Blueprint’s scope to include the other three colleges on North Campus: Architecture, Art & Design and Music, Theatre & Dance.

Jackie Cohen, too, has been able to defy stereotypes while overseeing the RC Review.

“A lot of people in the RC, there’s a stereotype of not being familiar with computers,” she said. “But (we) taught each other InDesign and Photoshop and all these layout tools and we lay it out ourselves.”

Submissions

When you’re finally ready to hand your masterwork over to the unknown, keep in mind that each magazine takes a different approach to the submissions process.

Though it’s published through the Residential College, the RC Review has accepted submissions from students at Eastern Michigan University and Washtenaw Community College. An RC alum who graduated in the mid-1970s submitted pages composed on a typewriter to a recent issue.

Fortnight has found a greater audience than ever before thanks in part to its more substantial online presence. A non-student from Australia even submitted a poem to the publication after finding it online.

“It was amazing. We just had to publish it,” Doukakos said of the poem. “It was just one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever read.”

There was also the novel abstract the magazine received from a retired University professor who was apparently confused about the size limitations of a monthly, less than 20-page, stapled student publication.

“It was terrible. It was a mess. Something about lotuses, I don’t know,” Doukakos said with a laugh.

While it may be easy to turn down a novel for publication, deciding among the piles of other, more legitimate submissions is a far more daunting task. The RC Review, Blueprint and Xylem each has its own anonymous submissions format, which allows the editors to rank each entry unencumbered. The submissions with the highest rankings pass the test.

Blueprint, started within the College of Engineering, employs a complex mathematical formula to determine its submissions.

“I’m still not sure I completely understand it,” Perng admitted, but he brought it up on his laptop and showed off the graphs and reams of data to many oohs and aahs from the others around the table. The formula involves grade-weighting the score given by each editor based on his or her editorial standing, as well as a threshold of how many words the magazine plans to accept.

Internal data reveals which editors were most critical toward submissions and which were the nicest.

“We kind of just made fun of each other, like, ‘Oh my God, you liked that work? That was so bad!’ ” Perng said.

“Have you considered publishing the graph?” Kinzer asked Perng, half-jokingly to Perng's response that would be unveiled at Blueprint’s release party.