By Tasawwar Rahman (‘22) and Priya Shah (‘22), Co Editors-in-Chief of the IA Overachiever

The 2020-2021 school year has been a monumental year for the IA Overachiever. Here are some of the highlights by the numbers:

Viewership:

• 11,000 views since August 2020 or around 1100 views per month.
• Increased viewership by 85% compared to SY 2019-2020 (and the years not even over!).
• Our exclusive interview with Darren Palmer, Ford’s General Manager of Battery Electric Vehicles, received 500 views.
• Our 2020 election coverage received 460 views.
• Our viewership in 2021 is already equal to our 2020 viewership (it’s only June)! We’re striving to reach 15,000 views by the end of 2021.

Club Updates:

• We finally bought a domain and ditched iaoverachiever.wordpress.com (RIP King)!
• Created a school news section and formed partnerships with buildOn and Forensics.
• Opened a new student creative gallery. 
• Started a new podcast section to showcase student voices.
• Organized a school wide mock election with subsequent data analysis and coverage. 
• Found out we have a significant amount of money saved which we will be reinvesting to help expand the club.

Plans for Next Year:

Continuing in the role of Editors-in-Chief are Tasawwar Rahman (‘22) and Priya Shah (‘22) who will be in charge of spearheading new initiatives and liaising with school administration to further promote the Overachiever. Rachel Rochford (‘23) will take on the newly established role of Development Director and will be charged with creating new educational experiences for members and expanding outreach for the club. Diya Ramesh (‘23) will be our new Managing Editor and responsible for the website and managing article output.

Some of the many ideas and goals we have for next year include:

• Joining the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association and entering journalism competitions.
• Taking on a bigger role promoting school and club news.
• Physically printing out our newspaper.
• Increasing our readership by 50% by establishing a more robust social media presence.
• Growing our new podcast section.
• Covering the school board and school events.
• Creating more educational experiences for members (such as presentations on journalisms, guest speakers, etc).
• Hosting a school wide writing competition and premiering movies about journalism.