Forgive me loves…

Forgive me loves…

…for the lack of a post yesterday. Work was hectic and I was busy because I had an interview!

I think it went fairly well. It was for an assistant editor position at a very small regional mag. I aced the edit test (HOORAY!) but I’m not sure I’ll get the job because it’s a very specific magazine about a certain animal that I know NOTHING about. Going in to it I figured I wouldn’t get it, but I thought I could definitely use the interview and edit test practice.

I’ve been doing this freelance thing for the past couple of days and I’m particularly fond of elance.com. I had to pay to use the service but I’ve already been accepted on two jobs, one random blog assignment and another for web content, and I made a couple hundred bucks! I don’t think that I’ll be able to use all the work I do through the site for clips, but I’ll definitely generate a few and I can seriously use the extra money. Someone’s break pads decided to blow out yesterday and now she has to spend $300 to get them fixed. *sigh*

I absolutely love all of your encouraging and helpful comments! One girl in particular said that this whole job search thing is basically a waiting game and I think I’m starting to agree with her. I’ve sent my resume to every single mag in the city, but the reality is that if there are no positions open, they’re probably not hiring. It’s been a couple of months since I last emailed and snail-mailed my clips, do you guys think I should give it another go? Do people normally check in or is it more likely that since an editor may not have been hiring at the time they got your resume, they just ignored it?

<3 Ed’s Girl On The Hunt

PS – Happy Halloween! :D

Where's the love?

I respect that it might be a little frustrating to read about an Ed Girl in Beantown while you’re searching for jobs in NYC, but the search is still the same for all of us chicas! With the exception of a lot of the whisper jobs and some specific mag questions on the message board, the site is geared towards the magazine industry in general, which includes cities throughout the world. I may drink Sam Adams and wear a Red Sox hat, but I’m just like the rest of you and I’m hoping that my experiences can benefit your own search in some way, just like your stories have helped me.

After a relaxing weekend, I dove back in to the search this morning. I actually got my current position (receptionist hell) through a temp agency, but I never considered going to one for editorial positions. My old editor from a mag I interned at last summer suggested this great agency that focuses on more creative positions like writing, editing, graphic arts, ect. So, after I finally finished up my online portfolio, I submitted my resume this afternoon and I’m hoping to at least get some freelance work from it, particularly on the editing side.

I’ve been worrying lately that I just don’t have enough experience to grab that EA position. After reading your posts and the entries of the last Ed Girls, I’m afraid that my three measly internships aren’t going to cut it! I can freelance write until the cows come home, but I feel like more editorial experience will beef up my resume. Have any of you found successful editorial jobs through a temp agency?

Oh, and in case any of you were wondering, I finally did hear back from my editor about the position and she did give it to someone else L. I guess I was expecting it, but it still stung to hear her say it out loud. Oh well…

<3 Ed’s Girl On The Hunt

Is it just me...

...or have the listings on craigslist been uncharacteristically meek the past few days?

I still haven’t heard from my editor about the EA position. She knew I had to give notice and said she’d take that in to consideration, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the job. Her last interview was yesterday and she said she was going to decide right away, so I’m assuming that, if I got it, she’d want to tell me immediately. BOO.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing tons of research on freelancing. I figured that since I have all this free time at work, I should really make a full-time go of it. The problem is I have no idea how to get started and I’m getting a little overwhelmed. I found this great resource at about.com (http://freelancewrite.about.com/) but there are so many steps and tips on the site that I don’t know where to begin! I already kind of had a website put together (yeah freewebs.com!), but no online portfolio or anything, which I guess is pretty essential. I also don’t have any of my clips saved on a computer. I’ve got them typed up in word documents, but no PDF files that actually prove they were printed. I’d link them all, but half of them are for a site that requires membership and a password.

Phew. I didn’t realize it was going to be so much work, but I think it will be worth it in the end. Eventually I’d love to freelance stories for big name mags, but I figure I’ll probably have to work my way up from the bottom. Do any of you have websites or online portfolios? Were they hard to make or am I just being super technologically challenged?

Well loves, I’m off for the weekend, I’ve got tons of shopping, beer tasting and baseball watching to do (GO SOX!)! I’ll be talking to you Monday…

<3 Ed’s Girl On The Hunt

It took me 45 minutes to pick out something to wear today…

…which means I definitely need to do some shopping. I haven’t bought anything (wardrobe-wise) since I moved here, which was about five months ago! I hate going to work feeling super ugly, which is how I feel right now in a frumpy old sweater and stretched out pants…*sigh*

So I went to my interview last night, the one I wrote about yesterday, and I can’t really tell how it went. I took the train in right after work and found the place pretty easily. When I met the editor (a woman I’ve talked with tons over the phone but have never met face-to-face) we immediately ran outside for a “walking interview,” which I’ve never done. I felt like I couldn’t really look at her, which was strange.

I thought things were going really well, she didn’t really ask me anything but basically went over the position with me and finally asked if I had any questions. I tried to think of something fast but she had covered absolutely everything and I had nothing to say. At the end she said that she had a few more interviews, some of which were with other writers who had been freelancing for her, and that’d she’d let me know by the end of the week. I’m kind of nervous because she said that she’d have a hard time choosing because she knew all of us and knew all of our writing. She said that, if I didn’t get the position, I shouldn’t feel bad or like I couldn’t freelance for her anymore because she loved my writing but had to choose between people she knew fairly well.

I’m not really going to get my hopes up or plan on actually getting the position, which is kind of disappointing. I probably got way too ahead of myself but I figured I would be the only one she actually knew who was applying. I guess, once again, I underestimated the number of people in this city who are in the same boat as I am…

<3 Ed’s Girl On The Hunt

One more reason I love Boston?

World Series mania! Everyone wore their Red Sox gear to work today to show their support for Game 1. I wish I realized we could go super casual, I would have ditched my work clothes for my Papi jersey.

So I think I may have finally caught a break! While checking craigslist yesterday (something I literally do every thirty minutes) I saw a posting for an Editorial Assistant for the newspaper I freelance for. Turns out the editor I write for is looking for some help with new pages each month. I emailed her right away, letting her know I was interested in the position and forwarded my resume and some clips from other publications. She replied after only five minutes and set up an interview! HOORAY!

I’m trying not to get too excited, but I think this is definitely a good thing. The paper is a lot of fun, very young, and not at all like some of the other ones I’ve written for. Plus, since I know her fairly well, I think I’ve got at least a little bit of edge on the other candidates. There would be a pretty substantial pay cut, but only because it’s part-time, and I could always get another job.

I’ve been thinking lately that I’m not at all confident in my basic editing skills. Maybe some of you have noticed in my posts? I’m sure I’m putting commas in all the wrong places. I’m thinking about taking a class or something, it will obviously come in handy. Perhaps I’ll check out mediabistro for some ideas. I always scour the site for job postings but I’m not a member so that’s basically all I use it for.

Do any of you guys pay to use the rest of the website? I hear it’s pretty helpful and some of the classes they offer seem really cool…

<3 Ed’s Girl On The Hunt

"Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History..."

…which is why I ditched work yesterday to send out tons of freelance resumes and clips. I can’t become the next Kate White while I’m sitting at a desk all day!

I’ve decided that I can at least freelance my butt off while I search for the perfect job. Eventually I want to work at a mag in the health/wellness/fitness field, so I’m focusing on writing stories like that. On the other hand, I have five or six really good health-related clips that I wrote for an internship, so I feel like I should be writing about some other things as well, just in case. I’ve been told that the subject of a story doesn’t matter as much as the writing, but I’m not too sure. I can’t really imagine getting hired at a fashion mag with only health clips or vice-versa.

I got an email yesterday from the editor of a local newspaper asking if I was still looking for a full-time job. It took me a while to figure out who the heck he was (I’ve sent out so many resumes I can’t even remember what jobs I’m applying for!) but I remembered that I put in for an assistant editor position I found on journalismjobs.com. I replied that I was still looking for a job and asked for some information about the position, just in case I still wasn’t remembering correctly what I had applied for. He said that he was interviewing for staff writing positions, which I’m not really interested in doing. Plus, I realized I’d be taking a $10,000 a year cut in pay. If it was an editing position or a writing position at a magazine, I might consider it, but it just doesn’t seem worth it. Plus, the commute is way over an hour so I’d spend tons of money on gas.

I replied saying that I was looking for a full-time editorial position, but thanks so much for the consideration and inquired about any freelance writing positions they may have available. I said it all very nicely and thought I was being courteous by letting him know, it’s not like I applied for this writing position anyway! He replied with this whole lecture about wasting his time and being ungrateful. I started to feel really bad about myself, like I wasn’t trying hard enough or something. I love to write but traveling around to town government meetings and working sixty hours a week for $20,000 just isn’t appealing to me, I feel like I’d be even more miserable than I am now!

What do you guys think? Should I have at least gone and interviewed? I just didn’t want to waste his time, but should I have considered taking the job even if it was definitely not something I wanted to do? Has anyone ever transitioned to magazine editing from a staff writing position at a newspaper? The two seem like worlds away…

<3 Ed’s Girl On The Hunt

PS – Thanks for all the great comments to yesterdays post, I’m wicked (obviously I’m from Boston…) excited that everyone’s keeping up with the blog!

The Life & Times of EdGirl #6

I’ve always known I loved to write and consider myself pretty good at it. In the 5th grade I won a short story contest after I submitted a piece about an acid trip gone bad. Obviously I had never done acid (ew!), but my much older, much more wild, cousin had tried it and described the experience to me so that I wouldn’t be curious. My parents were disturbed by the subject matter, but they were impressed by my “creative juices” and continued to let me write my twisted, adult stories.

Years later I finally discovered magazines. Skipping my homework and ditching my usual mystery novels, I’d lay in bed for hours scouring the glossy pages of CosmoGIRL, Marie Claire and Jane. Still, I never really considered it a possibility that someone actually worked for these magazines until I read one of Atoosa Rubenstein’s monthly columns in Seventeen. Describing how she turned her love of magazines in to a full-time job, she wrote about how she just randomly decided to make do a magazine internship and the rest was history.

Though I still knew nothing about the magazine industry, I enrolled in the Mass Communications department at my small college in Western Massachusetts and set up a concentration in journalism. I took an office assistant position at the school newspaper and wrote mini-movie reviews and covered student government meetings in my spare time. My sophomore year I was promoted to news editor and became editor-in-chief by the fall of my junior year.

I discovered ED2010 at the beginning of my senior year and was shocked and frightened by the amount of people with dreams like mine. Until that point, I had not realized how huge of the magazine market was. Few of the communications majors at my school studied journalism and those who did were more interested in becoming staff reporters at community newspapers than the next editor of Cosmo. Through ED, I learned as much as I could about the magazine industry and worked with the limited resources I had in my small town. During my last semester at school I took two internships, one in the editorial department of a national family magazine that happened to be based twenty minutes from my school, and another as a health reporter for a local daily. I spread myself pretty thin, but I felt like my experience, compared to that of others on the ED2010 message board, was lacking.

After graduation I took an internship at a regional mag based in Boston, which happened to be two hours from my home. Twice a week I commuted in and out of the city, burning gas money but soaking up more editorial and writing experience than I had ever gotten at my previous internships. I spent the rest of my time trying to decide what to do next. I knew I had to move, but didn’t think that I was ready for NYC. After months of deliberation, I packed up and moved to Boston, where I knew of a few regional mags and one national in particular that I had been dying to work at.

I started sending out resumes and writing samples as soon as I got to the city, not necessarily expecting my dream job, but at least a few interviews. After three weeks and twenty-eight resumes I hadn’t gotten any calls, let alone interviews, and my bank account was draining fast. I picked up a receptionist job to pay the bills and freelanced for a Boston daily at night. I thought I finally caught a break when I was offered a position at an international marketing company right outside of the city. It wasn’t a publication but I’d be doing all the editorial stuff, proofing, writing reports and publishing a company newsletter, and I thought it’d look better on my resume than “receptionist.” Plus, the pay was great, the commute fast and the dress code business casual (as opposed to my uptight reception gig where I had to wear a black suit every day). I took the position, eager to learn and excited at the thought of much more responsibility. I even moved out of my apartment in the city, where safety was becoming an issue, to be closer to my new job. I thought I was settled, not necessarily forever, but at least for a couple of years.

It only took me one day to realize that my dream job was not such a fairy tale after all. Instead of editing reports, I found myself answering phones again and staring at a blank computer screen all day, just waiting for someone to give me something to do. I had never felt so unimportant and useless. Still, with no other job prospects, there wasn’t much I could do, so I decided to stay and have been there for a little over three weeks now. When I heard that Ed was looking for a new Girl On The Hunt, I was excited for an opportunity to write and share my search with others, but a little sad that I was even in the position to do so.

So here I am again, searching for that perfect job. I love the company I work for, and the people are great, but the position itself is less than inspiring. The only good thing about having little to no responsibility is that I’m able to devote most of my day to the job search. Unfortunately, being in a smaller city with fewer prospects has made the process so difficult! Aside from the staff at my last internship, I basically have no mag contacts here and I definitely don’t know anyone nearby who is going through the same thing. I’m sure it’s just as hard in NYC, but it’s beginning to feel a little lonely out here in Beantown…

<3 Ed’s Girl On The Hunt

Goodbye and good luck!

Well, sometimes real life gets in the way of things like keeping blogs and searching for that perfect magazine job. For now, I'm incredibly glad that I have a steady job that's able to give me time off, health insurance, etc.

My search is on hold for now, but when it gets back underway I think I may have to make a drastic life change - perhaps quit my job and take an internship in order to get some New York magazine experience - I've been getting the feeling that my regional mag experience isn't really enough.

In the meantime, I wish you all the best of luck in your search. I've had a great time blogging for you!

Bye,

Ed's Girl #5