By Dara Adeeyo
On Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008, it was official. While Britney Spears celebrated her 27th birthday on Good Morning America and the PIX11 (formerly the CW11) Morning News anchors tried to get used to their new name, it was announced that the United States has been in a recession for the past year. A recession is something we all feared, but it is also something that we can’t deny was inevitable. Well, I’m not going to ramble on about what I think Congress should do because I don’t know what they should do and if someone thinks they do, please enlighten me or send a letter to Washington.
For the time being, I’m just worried about myself (selfish, I know). I’m a print journalism major who is on the road to entering one of the most competitive industries with few job opportunities: the magazine industry. And hot damn I am willing to do whatever it takes to get a job right after graduation. But I just can’t help but wonder if having internship after internship and journalism experience will be enough? Or if there will even be a job available for me?
When I got the chance to interview Seventeen magazine accessories editor Tina Langley, she assured me that it’s all about hard work.
Langley started her career at GQ magazine as the fashion closet assistant. After that, she became the assistant to the market director at Harper’s Bazaar. Having had enough of sitting at a desk for most of her day, Langley then decided to become a freelance stylist assistant. She worked at Vogue Nippon and Vogue China. Langley then landed a job at Nylon magazine as the associate market editor and in Feb. 2007, she became the accessories editor at Seventeen.
“With every single job I’ve had, it was about being in the right place at the right time,” she said. But that’s not all it was about. It was about hard work.
Raised in Naples, Fla., Langley has been working for most of her life. Langley got her first job at 14 bagging groceries at Publix. Then at age 15, she worked at an ice cream shop and pizza parlor. By age 17, she realized retail would be a good segue into fashion so she got a job in the shoe department at Burdine’s (a Florida department store). “I wanted money, I wanted independence,” she told me. That’s when Langley truly realized that she wanted to go into fashion magazines. Langley’s cousin worked at Vogue magazine and would tell her stories that left her amazed. Langley grew fascinated by New York and Paris. “When I looked through magazines, I wanted to be at the photo shoots.”
To get there, Langley attended Edison Community College (ECC), in southwest Florida. She could have run off to New York City and studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), but her mother had just passed away, so she decided to stay close to home, where she went to school part time and waited tables part time. After two years at ECC, she transferred to Florida Gulf Coast University where she decided that she “needed to get out of Florida and go to New York.” She started working as hard as she could in school, and it paid off. She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in communications.
This tidbit about Tina Langley is to simply inspire all of you. Sure, the recession is about to bring all of us already broke college students back a couple extra dollars, but being “poor” shouldn’t stop you from working as hard as you can. In the end, it’ll pay off- even if the economy doesn’t.
Dara Adeeyo is a sophomore print journalism student. You may e-mail her at