Dear readers, love from The Tab

Dear beloved readers,

Hope you’re all coping with revision and taking up residence in the McClay, and thanks for using your precious procrastination time to read The Tab.

My name’s Roisin and I’m a 3rd year student at Queen’s studying English. Last semester I decided, along with deputy editor Anna, to set up The Tab, an online student newspaper, at QUB.

Belfast Tab’s first night out was a sober affair.

I am now the editor of an online publication that has on average 41,197 hits a month, and we’ve only been going since November! Overall The Tab has a huge 1.3 million readers per month. Before this, I didn’t have much work experience in journalism and now thanks to The Tab, I have genuine experience and don’t have to lie on my CV when I graduate anymore. Wahey!

The rest of the team at The Tab Belfast is made up of students at Queens, all doing different degrees and in different years, all with little or no experience in journalism before The Tab. Now however, their CVs look rather flashy, as they are part of a national paper with sites at 35 UK unis.

The Tab in general has a fantastic track record of helping people into work after university, at publications such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Daily Mail and many more. Whether you’re a lefty, a righty or generally don’t give a shit either way, a job at a newspaper is what many of us aspire to, and we can help you get it.

As well as being helpful professionally, being involved with The Tab is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people at uni and cheesy as it sounds to make new friends (cringe).

We have weekly meetings and nights out every two weeks, so you get to feel part of a proper team and enjoy yourself rather than just churning out articles. In fact, we’re having our first meeting and social of the semester on Thursday 30th Jan and would love to see some fresh faces.

Getting drunk in free t-shirts, what could be better?

The point of all this is to encourage you to get involved, and to point out that we aren’t a team of scary corporate journalists, just a bunch of students having a laugh, writing fun and interesting articles.

The experience is invaluable. The Tab are not an official QUB society and so we’re unrestricted, totally self run and you can write as much or as little as you like on any student related topic you fancy.

We are growing fast and just about to start our second semester with new members joining all the time.

So give it a go, email us at [email protected] or contact via our Facebook page – don’t be shy!

And finally, you’ll get a free t-shirt – Need I say more?

Lots of love,

Roisin, Anna, and the rest of the Belfast team x