Our Guidelines

Thanks for your interest in blogging for the MIT Africans. The MIT Africans medium blog encourages MIT African students, alumni, and affiliates to share their passions, opinions, learnings, hardships and anything else one feels worth sharing.

With that in mind, we emphasize that we follow Medium’s Rule for articles published under our publication. This rule essentially prohibits behaviors that encourage violence, hatred, and harm both physically, mentally, or psychologically, so we expect that posts submitted follow those standards as well.

In addition, we also have our own guideline below.

What Can You Write About

We do not have a preference. Just keep it interesting and conversational. Unless your article fails to meet the Medium Rule or your story is not relevant to this page, we will most likely publish it. Ideally, we would love for you to conceive your idea and write a draft even before coming to this guideline page. However, if you simply would like to write for the MITAfrican blog, here are some of the topics that can be relevant:

• Your experience at MIT as an African or as a friend of Africa
• An important life lesson that you learned before, while at, or after MIT
• (If you are an artist) photos of and stories about your art pieces, be it painting, photography, drawing, dancing, or anything else. You can really define what your“art” is.
• What it’s like to be in Africa as an MIT alumni
• Your work experience
• Anything you feel worth sharing

You are not limited to the above list. You can go above and beyond it, so be creative and inspiring. However, one thing we would like from you is to include a photo in your article. This photo should ideally reflect the article, but it doesn’t have to be. If you can’t find a photo, you can always use Pexels, an online service that provide really nice photos for free.

What Makes a Good MITAfricans blog?

To give your blog a competitive edge, consider these tips:

• Have, and hone, a main message. Edit your intro so that the point of your post is ridiculously clear. (Your teachers weren’t kidding about the value of a thesis sentence.)
• Be prescriptive. Don’t just tell readers to do something. Explain how.
• Make it concrete. Give examples, details, metrics. Tell and show. Make it real. Deliver aha moments for readers who may be scratching their heads.
• Make it long enough to engage and enrich readers (and no longer): We don’t have a word-count limit.
• Avoid or explain buzzwords. Some of our readers feel turned off by geek speak. If you’re talking tech, help people understand — in a non scary way — what’s possible and why they should care.
• Include high res images (PNG or JPGs) and/or video.
• Let your heart show. Where appropriate, share your feelings!

On Submissions

We prefer unpublished drafts. Submitting drafts to us ensures that it will appear first in the home page. Medium publishes articles based on their submission dates, so if your article is already published, chances of it appearing in the home page are slim as more recent articles would have been published. Occasionally, we will also provide editing feedback before we get the article out. This ensures that the post both follows our core goals and comes out in its best possible light. Nevertheless, we can still accept published articles.

The draft you want to submit to us should either be fairly finished or still in the writing process if you would like to receive editing feedback. In the latter case, please send us an email at africans-blog@mit.edu to request feedback. In all cases, we will give feedback if we deem it consequential.

To finally submit your draft, follow the following steps:

1. At this point we assume that you already have a medium account. If you do not, please create one. If you do not want to create a medium account but still have written your draft, we can probably accommodate for your situation. Please send us an email at africans-blog@mit.edu with a link to the draft you want to submit and make sure to include your name. Note that this method of publishing will likely take longer to process, so we recommend just creating a Medium account.
2. With your medium account, please follow our publication page at medium/mitafricans.
3. Request to be a writer of our page publication using this form. If you do not request to be a writer, we will not be able to publish your post.
4. With the draft you have written, click on the “publish” tab and add the tag “mitafricans”. Then, to the right of the “publish” tab, click on the 3-dot menu icon, select “Add to publication”, and select “mitafricans”. If you do not see “mitafricans”, it means we have not added you as a blogger. Make sure to have completed the form on section (3). The following 3 photos illustrate these steps.

Add the “mitafricans” tag

Click on the 3-dot menu icon and select “Add to publication”

Selection “mitafricans” as the publication to add your draft to

In addition to the “mitafricans” tag, we encourage you to add more tags to your article because it help quickly identify the type of articles you are writing. Do certainly add the “MIT” tag if your post pertains to MIT.

With those four steps, you should be ready to go. We will review the most, provide feedback if necessary or requested, and publish your article when ready.

Questions? Concerns?

Got questions you don’t see answers to? Shoot us an email at africans-blog@mit.edu with any question(s) or concern(s). We’ll be happy to help.

Visit our website at africans.mit.edu