Celebrating Four Years of the A2C Discord: My Experience Running the Community
It's been four years since I created the server, so I figured I'd make our fourth post on this blog in honor of it.
In early December 2020, the r/ApplyingToCollege team had an idea: why not make a Discord community for the subreddit? A few other education subreddits established successful ones long ago, so it made sense we would have our own too. After some discussion, we agreed on the concept, with one moderator agreeing to take the lead and create the server. After a while without updates, I grew impatient and decided I would create it myself. The new ownership change was approved. As one of the youngest on the team at 19 years old, surely I would be able to handle this.
I figured it would be best to launch the server while early decision season was still in full swing. MIT’s early action decisions are typically one of the last major releases in the December bunch. When its date rolled around and I didn’t have a server ready, I panicked. I asked two active and trustworthy r/ApplyingToCollege users to become Discord moderators at 5 a.m. that day. Through some miracle, both accepted my offer within a couple hours, with one recruiting her friend as an additional helping hand. And by 10 a.m., we pushed the server’s link to the subreddit for anyone to join.
As I quickly learned, opening a Discord server for a subreddit that has hundreds of thousands of members is not something that should be rushed over the course of a morning, let alone doing it when decisions are releasing. We reached 1,000 members and a couple dozen bans within a few days. While I was able to recruit an additional nine server moderators over the next three weeks to support the workload, I was only able to successfully recruit one out of eleven other subreddit moderators for any additional help. It sucked, and I debated giving up and deleting the server altogether.
For some reason, I ended up keeping the Discord server open. I began trusting myself and my team enough to where I didn’t feel the server would explode the second I stopped checking it. I learned how to deal with the challenges academically inclined and chronically online high schoolers brought. They’re a handful, but once you figure out how to get through to them, you can really make a meaningful impact. I do wish I could get through to them in ways other than telling them to be S.I.G.M.A., but any way is better than no way.
During the four years the A2C Discord has been around, my own life changed drastically. Despite A2C’s notoriety as a place for high achievers, I started the server while I was on academic probation at a 4-year university. With the knowledge I gained from A2C, I took a gap year, transferred to a community college, and got my GPA high enough to transfer again to my current school. Managing the A2C Discord also got me to realize my passion wasn’t my initial major of computer science, but communication, which I now major in at UC Davis. I’ll be graduating this June with my bachelor’s in communication along with A2C Discord’s first year of applicants.
I would’ve been shocked if you told me any of this would be in my life path four years ago. But none of this would have been possible without the amazing team I’ve got behind me. I went from doing this alone to having an amazing team of server moderators, graphic designers (shoutout to Squirmy for designing the thumbnail of this post), developers, and even a question of the day team to engage the community. And of course, I have the support of 40,000 awesome community members behind me. I’ll always appreciate each and every one of you who check out the Discord, A2C website, and this blog.
Happy 4th birthday, A2C Discord. Thank you for all the memories, and here’s to many more.
P.S. I recently created my own blog. If you’re interested in keeping up with me, check it out below:
