Happy Hour With Ed

Hello fellow CAFMErs and interns! In case those of you reading don’t remember me from the beginning, I just graduated from UNC this May. While I was in college I got a lot of editorial experience writing for student publications, and I also had a fashion internship at O, The Oprah Magazine last summer and an editorial internship at the Carolina Alumni Review throughout my senior year. Right now I am an intern in New York at The Haykel Group, a small communications company that does simplification. I’ll tell you more about that in a later post, but right now I want to talk a little bit about the Ed2010 Happy Hour I went to on Wednesday evening.

It was the first Ed2010 event I have ever been to. I remember wanting to go to one last summer while I was in the city, but I had a late night in the fashion closet and couldn’t make it. So when I went to this one on Wednesday night, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was a little nervous and I think I was too focused on meeting someone who might be able to give me a job and making a good impression. I kind of expected it to be a lot of intimidating people who were established in the magazine business.

But when I got there, it ended up so casual and relaxing, and I found that there were a lot of interns or people who had fairly new jobs. So we sat down in the bar and just started introducing ourselves. And while there was a good amount of magazine editors, I also met a lot of girls in a lot of different departments and at many different types of publications or sites. It was so nice to just sit around and talk to people about magazines (which is one of the reasons we all love CAFME so much, right?).

I think that those events are so great because they remind us that networking is so important and you never know where these people will end up or where a connection can take you. I strongly encourage everyone to do whatever it takes, even is this means pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and going to an event where you might not know anyone. Don’t forget, most of those people are probably in the same boat as you and feeling the same way. And don’t forget to reach out the UNC alumni on the J-school’s alumni connection website. Tar Heels are always ready to help out one of their own.