You know someone’s passionate about a topic when they spend their free time—a rarity at Scripps College—writing about it.
But that’s exactly what Amy Borsuk ’14, Rachel Grate ’15, and Rachel Hennessey ’13 are doing. All three students blog for outside professional journals, writing on topics they care most about.
Each got into blogging while at summer internships; Hennessey worked in product development at Forbes this past summer but was disappointed to find her duties more technical than creative. “Being surrounded by so much editorial work every day, I was itching to get involved,” she says. “I came up with a few sample stories, begged to write, and got lucky when they said ‘yes.'”
Hennessey created her own beat by making her Forbes blog about everything and anything design-related. She offered to keep her blog going while at Scripps and continues to write about once a week; recent posts include an interview with event designer Preston Bailey, a look at the Denison Library American Vogue collection, and a critique of H&M.
For Borsuk, blogging was part of the job description. As an editorial intern for Ms. magazineduring the summer of 2011, she wrote more than a dozen articles on topics as wide-ranging as Hermione Granger as a complex feminist icon to affirmative action in Michigan.
“Blogging for Ms. was wonderful because it meant working in a feminist space and being able to write about issues I am genuinely excited about,” she says.
Blogging has also given Borsuk the skills to pursue other job opportunities—she currently works as a research assistant for English professor Jacqueline Wernimont, which includes contributing to a digital humanities blog. Borsuk has also written for Pink Pangea, a women’s travelogue, about her experiences as a Jewish female tourist in Rome, Italy.
Grate also uses blogging as an outlet to explore and share her views. She contributes regularly to MissRepresentation.org, a feminist nonprofit based in San Francisco, and maintains a weekly Media Roundup series in which she summarizes that week’s news about women.
“Scripps has given me a lot of passion about women’s rights, and blogging for MissRepresentation seemed like the perfect outlet to express my opinions about national topics,” Grate says.
Grate’s opinions have certainly reached thousands—MissRepresentation.org links to her posts on their Facebook page, giving her an audience of over 82,000 people. (Her first piece, on the portrayal of women in pop songs, was reposted by hundreds of people.)
Grate is inspired by her surroundings; she has written on the “freshman fifteen” after doing research in a Scripps class, on Taylor Swift after seeing her perform on campus, and on the way the college party culture degrades women. Her experiences as a Scripps woman also led to an op-ed piece about the 2012 presidential election for the San Francisco Chronicle and a blog at Ms. magazine of her own.
“Blogging has given me a platform to expand my Scripps education to a broader audience, and to apply the theories I learn in the classroom to personal situations and familiar songs and movies,” Grate says. “It transforms academic education into everyday language.”
All three encourage anyone interested in blogging to just go for it. It’s easy and free, and having writing samples and a readership helps land jobs with other publications. Borsuk suggests having someone, preferably another blogger, read over your posts before publication, “so you can learn the structure and connect with other bloggers.” Hennessey recommends taking a journalism course: “practice is the only thing that will improve your writing.”
And Grate has one final (and critical) piece of advice: “Choose a topic you’re passionate about!”
Want to read on? Check out Amy Borsuk’s blog posts for Ms. magazine here, Rachel Hennessey’s Forbes posts here, and Rachel Grate’s work here.