Anna Andreasyan (BAEC ’23) and Sona Gevorgyan (BAEC ’23): Founders of The Highlander Student Magazine

4 min read

In January 2021, during our junior year of studies, we launched an online magazine for students at the American University of Armenia (AUA), The Highlander. We wanted to create a platform where our peers could freely express their thoughts about student life and address community issues. The magazine is a virtual space for students to share their articles, creative works, illustrations, and photo series. 

Why The Highlander? Because we are people who live in the Armenian Highlands. Though a modern university with international educational values, AUA is nevertheless rooted in its local culture, history, and community. The name The Highlander reflects the intersection of the global and the local.

We decided to launch the magazine in 2021 because we felt that at that time, more than ever, we needed to reconnect with the AUA community. The 2020 Artsakh War and the Covid-19 pandemic were the two crushing forces that brought us to this realization. Following these events and prolonged online classes, we felt that there was a sense of separation within our community, so we decided to do what we thought was best in order to address these circumstances. 

Since the first year of our studies, we had worked well together on different projects for our classes, and that friendship soon served as the foundation for our team. As we were working on our final project for our journalism class, we wondered why our University didn’t have a student-led magazine. The magazine would allow students to raise their voices, to share their thoughts with the community, and to connect with one another. We also wanted to involve students not only in the humanities, but also from other majors.

The Highlander soon became a great way to learn about AUA students’ perspectives and insights on different issues they encountered. It also became an online archive of student lives and shared experiences. We wanted the magazine to not only reflect AUA life and serve as an internal platform, but also become an informative corner for the community beyond campus. 

It was our hope that the magazine would also become an educational tool and provide our peers with the necessary hands-on experience that would reflect what they had learned during their classes. This would enable them to gain journalistic experience working with the editorial team and create a professional portfolio. It would also allow them to work with a big team, contributing to their growth and development as writers, editors, illustrators, and photographers. As we began gathering our team, we held a variety of journalistic workshops for the first- and second-year students to prepare them to join the team in due course. 

The magazine features a variety of articles that are categorized into different thematic sections, which are dedicated to the community, to Armenia, to specific classes that are taught at AUA, to creative expression, and more. The magazine has also collaborated with different student clubs and worked with students from other universities in Armenia. This has given us the opportunity to network with students interested in fostering inter-university connections. 

Our articles are released on a monthly basis, as part of their respective issues. Each issue also features an editorial, which would previously be authored by the both of us and is now being written by our managing editors, Gaya Balian (BAEC ’25) and Nairy Bzdigian (BAEC ’24), who took over the day-to-day management of the magazine after our graduation in 2023. 

We have remained members of the editorial board, as we work with Gaya and Nairy, without whom The Highlander would not be where it is today. We try our best to mentor and support the team that is now working for our magazine, while allowing them to implement their own ideas and develop them further. 

Not many know that it was because of the AUA community’s belief in our idea that we were able to reach this point. We built the magazine from scratch; from the website to the social media, the magazine logo, and the graphics. All of this was the collective effort of our students and the product of their work.  

Graduating from AUA doesn’t stop some of our core members from continuing their work for The Highlander. Our developer, David Manvel Manvelyan (BAB ’23), who has been part of our team since day one, continues to work on our website to this day and assists our current team.

Throughout our journey, we have received tremendous support and encouragement from our peers, instructors, the Student Affairs Office, and the Student Council. Program Chair of the Bachelor of Arts in English and Communications Dr. Mica Hilson and faculty advisor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences Lecturer Maria Titizian, have also been guiding us and providing consistent feedback on our work.  

Earlier this year, The Highlander, in collaboration with the University’s Development Office, ran a student competition funded by the Vahé & Lucie Foundation. The competition aimed to increase student engagement with the magazine and encouraged the production of quality creative work. This was also an opportunity for students to receive a scholarship that would cover a significant portion of their tuition fees for the upcoming academic year. 

Although already an established and independently-run student magazine, The Highlander strives to become a sustainable operating body within the University. With the creation of the AUA Media Lab, we hope that the magazine will have new means to expand the diversity of its media output. 

Our vision is to build a legacy for the magazine. It is our great hope that current and future students will continue working on The Highlander for years to come.

Become a part of the AUA Student Voices series and tell us about your achievements, aspirations, and goals! Submit a write-up through our online submission form and tell us your story! Selected articles will be published on AUA Newsroom.