Academic journal’s premiere on the horizon

by Lauren Baker

Rider University’s first journal of student scholarship, Horizons: the Scholarly Journal of Rider University, will be in students’ hands next spring.

 Horizons will be published once a year in the spring on both campuses. This journal will serve to showcase exceptional scholarly essays written by students on the Lawrenceville and Westminster campuses.
Dr. Matthew Goldie of the English Department is the faculty adviser to Rider’s literary magazine Venture as well as Horizons. What makes this journal different from Venture and all other literary journals is that Horizons is geared only towards academic and scholarly works.

“The aim of Horizons is to publish the best scholarly student essays from across the disciplines on both campuses,” he said.

Not only will it be a showcase of scholarly works, but it will also serve as another link between the two campuses.

“It’s fairly exciting because it’s the first magazine of its kind as far as I’m aware,” Goldie said. “Students are fortunate to have some venues for publicizing their scholarship on campus: Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Awards, the Student Research Science Symposium, honors societies, the Baccalaureate Honors Program and other department theses, and so on. Horizons complements these activities by providing printed evidence of outstanding student scholarship by selecting from the best student essays each year.”

According to Horizons editor junior Michael Dominick, the new scholarly work will be at a much broader level than most other journals published at universities and nationwide.

 “We are looking for the best examples of Rider student scholarship,” said Dominick. “There are, of course, many publications that accept scholarly essays, but they tend to exclusively focus on one discipline. What’s so great about Horizons is that it accepts essays from all disciplines, allowing students from very different fields to explore one another’s work.”

The executive board has been going to faculty looking for exceptional works.

“We have also been spreading the word and talking to professors and department chairs so that they may encourage their students to submit papers that are academically excellent,” said Chris Kramer, a sophomore on the editorial staff.
Although Horizons will be a journal written exclusively by students, it also reaches out across the Rider community to faculty.“Horizons is a great opportunity for students to have their academic skills recognized by the Rider community,” Kramer said. “Oftentimes, just because an essay is academic, it is labeled ‘boring,’ but that is far from the case. We want to show Rider students the many exciting and resourceful essays that are written scholastically right in their community.”

Horizons is currently accepting submissions at horizon@rider.edu until Feb. 6, two weeks after the beginning of the spring semester.

This aims to be a journal that will not only display excellent works of scholarship, but will also bind together the Rider community. Horizons will be reaching to students across campuses, through faculty, and throughout disciplines, Goldie said.