The UGSG Master Plan
What does the future hold for the Undergraduate Survival Guide?
Context: Before starting the Ultimate Student Handbook, under the UGSG umbrella, I sat alone in my room wondering why I struggled to connect with people. I’d never been shy or hard to communicate with, so I thought taking to the internet was the best short-term solution. From there begins The Sophisticated Monkey and The Ultimate Student Handbook.
As you know, TUSH has grown into quite a community of readers and writers, driven to provide value through sharing our university and related experiences with the wider community. However, some readers may not be aware of the fact that our long term plan is to develop a wider range of platforms and services to better accommodate the ever-growing student body, even after we graduate. This is because our fundamental purpose has always been to cater to all students, far and wide, old and young, even beyond their days on campus.
It’s like university is a crossing in the road of life and we’re putting up some traffic lights.
Being a one-man army, a critical ‘bottleneck’ in the success of this mission is time. I’m a student, too. My time is, and always has been, limited, making it impossible to deploy and maintain all platforms at once, hence why we started here. Undoubtedly, TUSH had to be, well, ultimate. I needed a comprehensive student solution to get us started on the path of totality. TUSH needed to be intrinsically valuable to gain traction here on Medium though, beyond that, we needed a safe and open space to attract and retain our early community — you guys!
Even so, would that be compelling enough to build a community here? Will that actually play a role in developing an even wider community connecting students from all over the world?
In short, not really and kinda. Albeit neither is quite the point. Initially, a struggle was all but guaranteed given the aforementioned time restrictions and an inability to grow at scale, as with any early-stage platform. The strategy of UGSG is to build a publication with a significant number of writers to deliver stories consistently, something that our readers will appreciate creating an endless reward cycle. We create amazing stories, people love them and the community grows.
In the early days with just me as a writer, sustainability was always in question; not anymore. With over 50 writers, TUSH meets the minimum criteria to consistently produce content and grow over time! What that means is that we can push forwards with our greater goals and start growing across multiple avenues. Without giving too much away, I can say that our second avenue attacks a different dimension entirely — audio.
The Undergraduate Survival Guide, though still in its infancy, is a podcast I’ve built enabling students and other young professionals to share their experiences and lessons with me in the form of an interview. We’re still ironing out the kinks here but as with any fast-growing community, all the time freed up on this platform is reinvested into market research and guest acquisition, fundamentally growing our audio presence.
With TUSH pioneering our visual space, UGSG is our stab at audio before we take things to another level. Now to define the essence of our mission:
Connecting people
As previously addressed, me being a charismatic, outgoing and active individual, to have a difficult time in my first year at university sounds alien to most, though that was my reality. Despite never having an issue communicating with people, something had changed about the way I handled myself.
I was lost.
Something about sharing a flat with individuals of triple my entire family’s net worth made me feel incredibly small. I often feel alone at university, in no small part due to the fact that my people are so hard to define. Which people are my people, and which are yours? The truth is, we’re all far more similar than we are different, and the goal is to prove that.
Whether we decide to ‘stay in our lane’ or experiment with new ideas is up to us as individuals, but connecting people and building an open community only serves to better us as a collective.
Raising the bottom line
Having a community of individuals from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences offers us a unique opportunity. Those with less are afforded the possibility to gain from those with more, provided community operates on ideals. Ideally, everyone shares, everyone learns and everyone wins, raising the bottom line.
It’s no good for us to exist in a bubble where we aren’t growing, hence the UGSG community offers a platform for us all to unite and take matters into our own hands. Looking start a business at university but don’t know how? Ask us. Trying to get back on track with your overwhelming workload? Tell us. Need a distraction from the typical work cycle? Watch this.
Point is, we all make mistakes and fall down sometimes. I think that’s evident from many of our stories and podcast episodes so far. The difference is while we can generally get up on our own, sometimes we could all use a helping hand and some direction, even if we don’t always need it.
It’s like university is a crossing in the road of life and we’re putting up some traffic lights, built on past mistakes that you don’t have to make. Whatever you learn from us is up to you as our mission isn’t to instruct nor to advise, only to share and to listen.
Having said all of that, the new academic year is upon us and with it comes application season and online learning, our mission continues and our passion is stronger than ever. Here’s to making 2020 a year to remember… if it isn’t already.
In short, here’s our plan:
Build a self sustaining visual platform, thriving in one dimension
Use that foundation to launch an audio platform, thriving in a new dimension
Use the knowledge gained from both to create an audio-visual review series
Integrate platforms and enter the third dimension… When the world allows it
