October 15, 2025
by Denise Angelica Clave
You might be wondering how I get involved here, right? Well, my journey is as ineffable as always, but that’s no absolute, mind you. This article attempts to solve that, and it’s where I can finally put some of my [mis]adventures in The Altitude, AISAT’s renowned official student publication, into words.
Here’s a bit about myself: I’m perhaps the highest-ranking (de facto) IDT representative among the publication who probably knows a thing or two about journalism, but I am not kidding when I say I have no clue what I’ve been doing for a long time now. I mean, I get that anyone who’s known enough about me would think that this would be a logical path for me, but I myself am a little more versed in writing fiction, if anything. Still, I’ll just give myself a pat for actually going with the journalist’s path. I may be clueless, but I’m here to thrust the truth… in my own little way.
As of recently, I act as the publication’s feature editor… who also dabbles in graphic design? It’s funny, I know. Who would have thought I’d go through a silly dare I put myself in, simply because I seemed to be in dire need of an outlet to write my heart out?! And when I did show up, the literary department was long gone. I would know, I read those printed issues from earlier during that one Club Day… well, Club Week event. (Ah, fly high, literary department. Who knows when we need you once more?)
There’s not much I can say about my strategy. However, it comes at the cost of speed, so my thing is less “regular churning out banger after banger” and more “last spurt article ideas”. Unfortunately, I have yet to actually practice buffering. It should be obvious that one should not think of me in a single dimension, so figuring this all out when you’re an esteemed member of the editorial board with two titles in your name and a project lead in at least one subject… is already too daunting.
At least I think I have a knack for rambling around and taking the world in. After all, one can also take examples from the observed world to make fictional stories like I usually do, but one can also take them as they are and observe your observations. Feature writing is all about the human experience, and as such, I usually find myself having to strike a balance between plain old record-keeping and falling so deep into my own vision it hardly reflects what everyone else sees. I have to play around with the irony of being a recluse who’s here to get to read the room and the people around it. That worked for a while now, and I’ll stick around and test the waters some more.
And what do you know? I keep telling myself that I’m running out of ideas to write. In truth, there’s simply too much going on around me lately in terms of projects that it’s getting more difficult to attend to one of them at a time.
Yes, it’s all about the unfamiliar, now made familiar. It’s all about how the aviation lore descends from above to meet our world. And it’s all outside our reach… right?