Meet the Ebster Field

What is the Ebster field, and what do you do?

The Ebster is our web-based newsletter in which we post articles and stories, mainly for our own students. However, even potential new students, alumni or just a curious visitor can find relevant and interesting information here, about our community and school. The articles might come in handy especially to new students, since the web-page contains about 5 years worth of materials which can help with getting to know the community, events and the school itself.

The job of the Ebster field, is to keep the web-page running, provide informative content, upload new articles and to ensure that anyone can read our page – whether it would be an Estonian reader or an international student. 

Who are the members of your team this year?

As of today, we have four lovely ladies in our team. Every one of us came to EBS on a different year. We represent courses from 2017, up to this years’ students.

Marlen – Open-minded and sincere. I enjoy acquiring new knowledge and new experiences. I’ve been in the Student Council for about 3 years. I have stayed in the Ebster field throughout the years because I liked dealing with texts and articles. For the past two years I was actually the translator. Today, I am the field manager. 

Johanna – Bubbly, friendly, open. I am always in a good mood and I I have a chill attitude. I like travelling, reading books and discovering new restaurants. My friends know that I am a total night owl. When they wake up in the mornings, they already know that there might be long texts about random things in their Messenger chat, which i wrote to them while they were asleep. If you happen to meet me for the first time, I will probably show you a picture of my dog, in the first 5 minutes. I write the Meet Me Mondays for The Ebster, so if you have a great person to suggest then hit me up!

Sigrid – Positive, full of life and active. I like to meet new people, which is one of the reasons I joined the Student Council. I love the nature, snow, animals and warm hugs. One of my passions is cooking, and my macaroni salad has won over quite a few Student Council members and even international students. This year, I am the translator for The Ebster. 

Merili – Self-confident and determined. I do things with passion, or not at all. I chose the Ebster field because of my previous interests and experience. I am the founder and a “retired” editor in chief for the school newspaper Oma Allikas of Tartu Waldorf Gümnaasium (high school). I value good quality, innovation and effort.

How long does it take to create one article? Describe the process a bit.

The answer differs, based on which article is up for the discussion. For example, the Meet Me Monday which is based on simple questions will go through a slightly different path than just an informative, research-based story. 

It’s possible that some articles are ready in a few days, whereas others might take over a month or two, because we have to wait for the hard-to-get-answers of the personal interviews. It’s heavily dependent on the person who is providing us with their answers. To contrast, every other article is a responsibility of our own writers, so they usually take less time – about a week or so.

If we leave out the specific attributes of personal stories, like finding and contacting people, doing research and creating questions for people, and waiting for their responses, then overall, every article goes through the same path.

Firstly, the writer will create an article, which then goes through editing process. The article is looked through for grammatical mistakes and tweaked a bit to make the reading easier. Then it’s up for translation, whether to Estonian or to English. The translation will also go through editing process. The last step is to upload the article – once the uploading process is in work, we have to make sure that the text is correctly aligned, separated and that everything is in place. If we have the opportunity, we will add relevant pictures, links, videos and references. The only thing left to do is to hit “publish”.

Is there anything changing in your team work? Do you have anything new coming up?

We don’t want to make any public announcements at this time, but there are some plans cooking. They have not reached the launching point yet, but hopefully there are some new things coming up in spring semester.

For example, right now, we are testing out having two project based members, and how the dynamic works. If things go according to plan, then you’ll see some new content on our website.

We are also in the middle of recruiting a new editor to our team.

Your most read series is Meet Me Monday. How do you pick people for it?

It’s true. This is our most read series. Of course, it’s interesting if there’s a posted article of your classmate or even a friend, which gives you a new viewpoint from where to learn something new about this person. Especially if you are not so close to them yet.

We find people mostly through suggestions or when they have catched our attention with their activities. We find it also really cool when someone is active and interesting enough to reach out to us by themselves.

Why would you recommend to join the Ebster field?

We would recommend you to join us to keep the hard work of our own students alive and to make something better of it. Ebster is your team if you enjoy creating and writing; if you are just pretty linguistically strong; or if you are just looking for an opportunity to leave a mark to EBS community. One of our advantages is that the time planning is your own responsibility, since you pretty much can work form any place at any time – contrary to dealing with organizing events or something similar which would require a lot of time of being physically present at certain locations.