My project intends to ultimately uplift the voices of student-athletes struggling with mental health-related issues while raising awareness for an underrepresented issue in the media. The intersection of mental health in students, and mental health in athletes is a dangerous one that is most often ignored by college athletic programs and universities. Overtime Magazine will attempt to bridge the gap in discussion of the issue, and provide a place for student-athletes at SJU to converse about their issues, which they most likely have never addressed before. By providing a medium for student-athletes that are also your peers, can impact the SJU community by sharing how the people around them whom they may even look up to, are struggling in silence.

The best case scenario for my project is to find 4 individuals to be a part of my project that all share their struggles as a student-athlete, but represent as many diverse communities as possible. While I know this is very difficult, I would like to do my best to have as many different, genders, races, ages, ethnicities, disabilities, etc. within the 4 individuals as possible. The downfall of this is that my options are limited in not only the community I have a pool of options from but also the small number of SJU student-athletes that are willing to speak on their mental health issues. So, the worst-case scenario would be not executing the selection of diverse student-athletes to the best of my ability.

In approaching the design of my project, personal identities play a role in how I will layout and design each page. Because of the nature of the topics we will be discussing, I want the design of my magazine to be welcoming and uplifting, but also serious. The topic of mental health and the issues surrounding them can be very triggering to those who have experienced them themselves. My audience will include other people in the community who struggle with mental health issues, and I want to focus on the delivery of my magazine, and making sure it is executed in a non-triggering way. At the start of each article, I will have very clear topic trigger warnings, listing what topics will be discussed in each article. While I am not exactly sure what topics will come about in each discussion, I want to be prepared to ensure my audience is comfortable even opening my magazine. Some identities that I could be missing are those who cannot see. Considering my magazine will be printed, with no way of hearing the words or content, it can exclude the blind community or those with vision impairments or reading disabilities. To combat this, I hope to have a digital version of my project with the appropriate tools to hear each aspect of my project.