Nurturing a Garden of Ideas

The physical copies of our Autumn 2024 issue, my first issue as editor-in-chief!

My senior year, I was selected by the previous editor-in-chief to serve as the editor-in-chief of The Garden of Ideas, UW's undergraduate philosophy journal. I had worked as an editor for the journal for the past year, so I was already familiar with the editing process. Leading the journal, however, was still a steep learning curve. I ended up learning a lot about leadership and am proud to be leaving the journal better off (in my view) than when I took over.

When I first took the journal over, I quickly realized that one of the biggest tasks that I would have to do would be setting a vision for the journal. To do so, I implemented the following changes, some more successful than others.

First, I wanted to provide feedback for every piece accepted, no matter how good it was. When I submitted to other publications like Gadfly, Columbia University's undergraduate philosophy magazine, one of the features of the submission process I found most valuable was to get high-quality feedback from others to improve my piece. Therefore, even for pieces that we didn't feel needed any edits to be published, our editing team left suggestions to make the piece even better.

Second, I also wanted to provide feedback to the pieces that we rejected. I felt that one of the unique values we could provide as a small journal was to provide personalized feedback to all contributors. Therefore, even for pieces that we rejected, our editing team emailed the contributor with one compliment and one suggestion for improvement.

Finally, perhaps the biggest change I made was to begin printing physical copies of the journal again! The journal had printed physical copies in its first year, but then stopped for the next two years. This was an especially difficult year to begin printing copies, since the higher education funding situation meant that the philosophy department couldn't help us finance the journals. It took longer than I expected, but finally in Spring 2025 we self-financed the printing of 35 copies of our Autumn 2024 issue! We even sold a few copies, which helped bring the total cost down to a very reasonable price when split between all members of the team.

Overall, I'm incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to lead the journal alongside some fantastic philosophy students. Though our first meeting this year was somewhat awkward, I ended up getting to know all the members of our team and had so much fun at each and every meeting. We managed to achieve an incredible amount, conducting 2 interviews with faculty members and publishing 2 full issues of the journal this year. In the end, it is these friendships and connnections that I will treasure the most as I leave the journal in the hands of our next editor-in-chief.