In late November of last year, we published an editorial and we were only 7 weeks in operation as this years DEBAT committee. Back then, COVID-19 wasn’t a thing yet and we as the committee had several meetings to work on both the magazine and the website. That was working very well until the COVID-19 outbreak. It was therefore a big shame we could not publish the third edition as a normal magazine, but as separate articles online. The fourth edition of DEBAT will also be published that way, online only and it will be online in the near future
Within the DEBAT Online committee, we’ve written weekly articles every week, with of course a lot of attention for the COVID-19 outbreak and the political implications. As you’ve been able to read last week, COVID will change the next academic year too. On the other side: as politically interesting as COVID-19 is, it is getting quite boring if you ask me. Without any events, meetings and normal classes is socializing is different and in my eyes less personal. Not to mention we cannot visit our family’s like we normally would. But not only the social life of our committee is different, but also the topics we write about. Finding interesting, totally not COVID-related topics is hard and if you find them, they are usually not the easiest ones to write about or just simply not very interesting for the public we are writing for. That being said, I think we tried to mix both COVID and other interesting topics well together.
In November I wrote how hard it is to find proper images for the articles as we can only use copyright free materials, but that is changing now. With the experience of searching for images more and more, it gets easier and we managed to have a proper header for almost every article. Our article lay out is also a bit changed, as we use citations and highlights more, as we would in our physical magazine. It especially makes the also in the magazine published articles look a lot better if you compare them.
With all that being said and the academic year coming to an end, we will of course keep writing articles in the next couple of weeks. Together with the publication of the fourth edition of DEBAT, there’s plenty of content planned for the next few weeks. If you have some ideas or comments for the next few weeks, email us as we would love to hear ideas and feedback from our readers. To finish off, we wish everyone the best with their last exams or thesis in the final few weeks.
On behalf of DEBAT Online,
Daniël van der Hak
Secretary & Editor Online for DEBAT
