In the spring of her senior year at Harvard, Madeleine Reeves got creative. With a slew of impressive internships under her belt — including Teen Vogue and The Oprah Magazine — she, like many other eager and hopeful magazine editors, was on the job hunt. And in just a few months, recent grads like herself would descend upon New York City, without a job, and vie for a spot on the masthead of their dream magazine.
Madeleine, now the Deputy Editor of Cosmopolitan, took the road less traveled. “The day after graduation, I drove down to Birmingham, Alabama and moved into a $600 a month apartment and started my job,” she tells Her Campus in an interview celebrating the 15th anniversary of the brand.
That job was an Editorial Assistant role at Coastal Living, which ran out of the Birmingham. It is there that Madeleine kickstarted her career. “It was working on travel stories and profiles and interior design stories … Total dream job.”
Read on to learn about Madeleine’s important advice for aspiring writers and editors, what she learned from her time at Her Campus, and how the rom-com era shaped her dreams.
Her Campus: Tell us a little more about yourself when you were in college. Where did you go to school and what did you major in?
Madeleine Reeves: I went to Harvard — class of 2013 — and I studied English. I was mostly interested in the creative writing element of things. I very much knew that I wanted to work in magazines. But I was also really passionate about English literature and psychology. I took a lot of psychology classes there, which I think prepared me well for some of the more journalistic elements of what I do now.
HC: What was your dream job growing up? What about when you were in college?
MR: I knew I wanted to work in magazines. I think growing up in the rom-com era, being a magazine editor was a big part of that. But also, I just had this real love of service journalism and the things I would learn from magazines that got delivered to my mailbox every month. I knew going into school that’s what I wanted to do ultimately. I think a lot of folks who know they want to go that path will try to go to New York for school so they can intern during the school year.
HC: What was your role in Her Campus at your college?
MR: Windsor [Western], Stephanie [Kaplan Lewis] and Annie [Wang] started Her Campus their senior year, which was my freshman year. [They were working on] Freeze magazine which then became Her Campus. So I got involved with that my freshman fall and was involved throughout my time in college.
I wrote a lot of articles my freshman year, which was really fun. I remember we used to highlight campus hotties and it was so funny because I forced all of my guy friends that I made freshman year to do it. And these poor guys, it still pops up sometimes on Google and they’ll get roasted for it a little bit. We also had some really great chances to write things that were that hyper-local campus beat.
And by the end of my time at Harvard I was running the chapter.
HC: Do you have any specific memories from your time in Her Campus?
MR: I remember writing one story about how to recreate favorite fast food-style meals, or restaurant meals, in the dining hall out of what they had there. It was super hyper-specific and niche to [the Harvard] community, and it was a fun to dig into [that content] that really wasn’t available elsewhere.
HC: Is there anything that you learned during your time with Her Campus that you still utilize in your career now?
MR: Starting with story ideas and pitches from a place of “what are my friends and I talking about” is very much how we approach things at Cosmo. Obviously it’s a very different scale, but I think it’s still so hyper-relevant of whatever is in the group chat or whatever really sparks dinner table conversation with my best girlfriends.
HC: What advice would you give your college self?
MR: I was thinking about this and it’s one thing to think about what advice I would give 2009 Madeleine, but I think what’s so incredible and wonderful about 2024 is that there’s just so much more access to pitching to major national brands and outlets or to becoming a creator on your own. The advice that I always give to college students or people new in their career and that I would give to myself if I were to go back, is that A), you don’t need anybody to publish you immediately. That’s the goal — that’s what we want to get to. But as you’re starting out, just write. Write and publish yourself on a blog site, on Substack, on Medium, or in long Instagram captions. You can self- publish in so many different ways on the internet now.
So publish yourself as much as possible and then pitch to major national outlets. Don’t be afraid — you’ll get a lot of nos, but there’s no reason why you can’t be pitching to a magazine like Cosmo while you’re in college if you’re really, really specific about how you’re pitching. I think there’s a lot to be said for quality over quantity when it comes to sending cold pitch emails, but the best pitches are things that are hyper-specific to you. So that means if you’re in college, what is the college student’s POV on one hyper-specific issue within this election? And how can you pick maybe an op-ed that only you could write from your experience to a major national outlet? I think there’s just no reason to limit yourself to only writing for campus publications.
HC: What did the year after graduation look like? Did you find a job right away? What was that job?
MR: I had an interesting experience coming out of college. I had interned a couple of times in college, first at a local magazine in D.C., then at Teen Vogue in the fashion closet, and then at The Oprah Magazine through the ASME internship program. As part of the ASME program, we would have lunches with magazine editors and get the opportunity to have all of these networking sessions. That was the summer before my senior year. And the thing that I heard over and over again was that the way to get a job is that you have to move to New York after graduation without a job or put on your resume that you live in New York. And you had to be willing to show up in New York the next day for an interview.
I knew I was going to be graduating with student loans and nobody to pay my rent, so I was like, that’s not going to fly for me. I was very open to other ideas and as I was doing research and digging in, I found that Birmingham, Alabama actually has a huge magazine office. There’s now two different companies that have offices [in the area], but at the time it was just Time Inc., and they had these magazines there like Coastal Living, Cooking Light, Food & Wine.
So I spent my whole senior year stalking job sites, and one day I saw there was a job posted in Birmingham, Alabama for an Associate Editor at Coastal Living. And it was a total dream job. It called for three to five years of experience, and it was working on travel stories and profiles and interior design stories — a lot of writing and reporting as well, and some fact checking and copy editing. Total dream job. And it had been posted for four or five months! So at that point I thought I might as well send over my resume, email them and see if they’re still hiring for it because it’s been posted for so long, maybe they’re having a hard time finding somebody in Alabama. And lo and behold, that was the case! And even though I didn’t have the adequate years of experience that the role was calling for, they had me do an edit test.
This was March or April of my senior year and they flew me down for an interview. I met with a bunch of people there and they actually hired me and waited for me to graduate. So the day after graduation, I drove down to Birmingham, Alabama and moved into a $600 a month apartment and started my job that they changed to be an Editorial Assistant job. And it was wonderful.
HC: What did you learn from your first job out of college?
MR: So much. I loved that it was half writing and reporting and half copy editing and fact checking because we were really thorough in the fact checking — that really helped me. We would have these folders — everything was printed out — and we would have these folders where the reporters or the writers on any story would have all of their sources. And sometimes I was reporting the story a second time, so I got to see how a lot of writers worked, and I really took it upon myself to learn as much as I could. I would take the folder for a feature story and read through all of the rounds of edits, read through exactly what the Editor-in-chief had wanted, how the writer had made that revision. That really taught me a lot, both about writing myself, but also about editing.
HC: What is your job now? Can you describe what a day-in-the-life looks like?
MR: Currently I’m the Deputy Editor at Cosmopolitan. I have been [at Cosmo] since 2019 and I’ve moved my way up the ladder there. My current role works across print and digital — I oversee a couple different verticals. It is funny because it’s one of those things where it’s hard to sum up with a tiny bow what I do because it touches so many different things. One huge piece of it is content and managing teams that produce content for the site and the physical magazine. There’s also a huge strategy element to it, which is really exciting to me and a lot of fun. We get to think about the business side of things, and think about consumer revenue. We get to think about the future of the brand. I’m the lead editor on our cover stories — it’s really fun getting to decide who really makes sense for the brand right now, and what story are we trying to tell with them? I’ve learned so much through that.
HC: What is your favorite thing about your current job?
MR: I often say the people, which is so true, but I think it’s also the possibility. We live in a quickly-changing media landscape, and you have to be constantly ready to pivot and constantly ready to evolve and change and grow. I think I thrive in an environment like that. I love that our priorities a month from now could involve something that’s not even on our radar just yet. I love getting to — as I’ve climbed the ladder — really take a holistic view of the brand and how everything fits into the bigger picture. And we talk a lot about future proofing Cosmopolitan — how to bring it into another generation. Those are the conversations that really excite me the most, getting to play a small part in the long, long legacy of such an incredible brand.
For more Dream Jobs interviews with Her Campus alums, check out Celebrating 15 Years of Her Campus here.