Females for Finance plans magazine with Design Club

Members of the Females for Finance Club meet during lunch on March 28.

The magazine allows F4F to produce an actual product and build off learning from the first semester.

The Females for Finance (F4F) Club and Design Club announced a partnership to create a school finance magazine to show off students’ financial literacy, with a tentative plan to publish the magazine online by the end of the school year.

The magazine will cover topics such as the fintech industry and creating social impact through financial investments. The publication will also feature interviews with local business owners.

The five officers of F4F — seniors Sarah Frederick, Noor Khan, Eva Ruemmler, Elizabeth Stoiber and Samantha Stoiber — will edit all articles in the magazine and hope to receive additional guidance from their F4F mentor, Safia Williams, if possible. The magazine layouts will be created using Adobe InDesign by five members of the Design Club: sophomores Hillary Gonzalez, Yana Kappor, Jena Lew and Isabelle Wang and junior Sarah Thomas.

Ruemmler, the president of F4F, said her goal with the magazine was to give club members an opportunity to showcase the knowledge learned from club meetings. Traditionally, the F4F officers spend the first semester teaching basic financial literacy to their members, as most new club members do not have any background knowledge.

F4F opened up signups for the magazine’s articles in February through a link on their Instagram account and an announcement in principal Greg Louie’s Friday newsletter. Prospective writers were asked to give a topic idea and briefly explain the contents of their article.

The officers have not yet begun editing the articles, but Ruemmler said they would approach the editing in a style similar to the journalism program. She added that they are requiring writers to list all sources so the officers can ensure all the magazine’s content is credible.

Ruemmler and the F4F officers were inspired to create a magazine from a previous partnership between Design Club and Astronomy Club, which worked together to create a school astronomy magazine — Nova Spatia — last year. She said that many other high schools and universities around the nation also produced finance magazines, so it seemed like a natural step for the club.

The magazine will only be available online due to high printing costs, a lesson Ruemmler said she learned the hard way from journalism programs like Soundings and The Falcon’s senior magazine.

Ruemmler reached out to Design Club co-president senior Kasie Yang for the partnership, hoping to emulate the previous partnership between the club and Astronomy Club. According to Design Club vice president senior Samika Agarwal, Design Club members will have a lot of artistic freedom with their pages, but the club will first work out a mood board to provide members with a general theme to follow, drawing inspiration from Pinterest styles and group brainstorms.

During regular bi-monthly Design Club meetings, members will have opportunities to seek feedback from officers, and each page will also be individually critiqued to ensure continuity in style and theme.

“I hope Design Club members get a chance to build an [art] portfolio and practice their design skills,” Agarwal said. “In general, there isn’t a big emphasis on arts or the humanities at this school or in the Bay Area, so it’s nice to have an opportunity to get involved in design, even if you don’t want to pursue it as a career.”

Apart from working with F4F and Astronomy Club, the Design Club has also created posters for the Green Committee and TEDx Club, as well as built a sensory pathway — decorative floor art meant to stimulate children’s five senses — for Saratoga Elementary.

Yang hopes the Design Club’s end-of-year magazine collaborations will become an annual event. She plans to host a speaker series later this year for students interested in art and digital design to learn more about the field. Similarly, Ruemmler hopes that the F4F magazine can become a yearly tradition for future members to take advantage of as well.

“I hope people find value in [the magazine] and see it as an opportunity to expand their learning with financial literacy and start to find a passion in finance.”