Check out College Fashionista right now, and you'll find 20 back to school beauty deals or 15 pairs of shoes you need for the start of the academic year. The website has been a total game changer for Madison Savage '23 – not for the fashion trends, but for the opportunity.
"It's leading me down a path that I never thought I'd be a part of. It's shaped what I want to do beyond graduation."
College Fashionista provides beauty, fashion, and lifestyle tips for their college-age demo. They've got the pulse of the college student because the authors are exclusively college students. The process to write for the website is incredibly selective. Only 50 students each year make the cut, and the writing room is often full of students from major universities.
"On a Zoom call with all of the other writers from Miami and UCLA, I said I'm from Siena College, and I told them about the school."
Madison is a marketing major, but she's always enjoyed fashion and writing. She never considered either a career option, until she submitted a writing sample to College Fashionista and got in.
Madison wrote for Her Campus and the Promethean, but it always felt more like a hobby than career preparation. When she made the cut with College Fashionista, she had a lightbulb moment. If she's good enough to land this opportunity, why not make a career out of it?
"I think I was sort of pigeonholing my professional opportunities based on my major. But you should explore all your options and not set yourself up in one category. Even if your internship doesn't include the name of your major in the title, that doesn't make it a bad internship!"
Madison will submit four or five articles this fall. She pitches ideas to the editor-in-chief, and then works through revisions before the piece is posted to the website. Her first piece was on fashion trends she observed in Italy while studying abroad.
She'll graduate this December, and then plans to study communications in graduate school, likely in New York City so she can be close to the fashion scene. In the meantime, what are some staple pieces every college student should have for the winter? Madison is working on that piece right now.
