I didn’t get into 34th Street Magazine the first time I applied. It was freshman fall, and like a bad chef, I was just throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. During New Student Orientation, I took a copy of the Party Issue from a stack in Houston Hall. I didn’t know then that it was the first-ever glossy magazine Street had produced; I just liked the cool cover of a green, glowing cocktail held up by a blurry blue figure. I knew I wanted to write and was toying with journalism, and the editor-in-chief at the time showed up to the info session in a teal velour sweat suit — so I was pretty much sold that this was the place I was meant to be.
I received my rejection email a week later.
In the spring, I threatened to drop out of Penn just about every other week. My mom received phone calls on a regular basis, sometimes of me just crying into the receiver while she listened on the other line. I applied again to Street. I made a deal with fate: If I don’t get in, I drop out. Dramatic, I know, but didn’t everything feel like life or death that first year?
I received my acceptance on the morning of my 19th birthday.
My first editor, Natalia Castillo, had been the one to encourage me to apply to write for Summer Street. Much later, she told me she thought I was cool after that initial meeting because I had pink hair (total accident) and was working as a barista for the summer (I didn’t get any internship offers). The Music editor at the time, Hannah Sung, whom I knew then as just the girl in my Beatles class, had been the one to tell me to apply for an editor position in the fall.
I didn’t get any of the three positions I applied for, beat out by other candidates. But the then-editor-in-chief Walden Green offered me Style editor because they needed to fill the slot. I met Norah Rami, the then-Ego editor, at our first editor meeting of the semester. She invited me to her housewarming later that night.
When I finally made my way to print managing editor — a full circle moment, really — I required that editors hand out the glossy mag on Locust Walk. I sold the idea to them by promoting it as “rejection therapy.” For every one person who takes a magazine, about 15 will ignore you. But how rewarding was it when someone finally made eye contact with you, crossed the brick pathway, and liberated that glossy mag from your hands?
It’s often said that anything easy isn’t worth doing. I learned, from that first rejection, that Street was not easy. And it’s been the single most rewarding thing I have done in all of my time at Penn. I can’t help but flip through all those print issues and feel proud of the work that my editors, writers, and fellow Strexec members have accomplished.
Maybe life is a numbers game. The more times you put yourself out there, the more often you risk failure, but the more likely you are to get one thing right. I like to think of it as a resilience game. You can’t avoid falling down forever, so learn to say, “Ow, that really hurt,” and get back up.
The first ego I ever wrote was for the 2023 Penn 10, and the theme was, fittingly, failure. It’s almost taboo, at a place like Penn, to wear your failures, mistakes, and weaknesses on your sleeve. My interviewee, Niva Baniya, failed an art history class her junior year. As an impressionable first year, she relayed the piece of advice that stuck with her most: “You can’t be perfect your entire lives, no matter how hard you try … but the way you come back from it is what matters so much more.”
My bruises, rejection emails, and the rude stares I’ve received have piled up over the past four years as evidence of the times I fell. But so, too, have my accomplishments, the friends I’ve been incredibly lucky to hold close, and the glossy mags with my name on the masthead.
I’m thankful for that initial rejection and my haphazard path to where I am now. I can’t imagine my college experience without running this little arts and culture magazine with my friends.
SSSF,
JULES LINGENFELTER is a College senior studying English, creative writing, and journalism from Zelienople, Pa. She served as the print managing editor of 34th Street Magazine on the 141st Board of The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc. Previously, she served as Features editor and Style editor. Her email is jaling@sas.upenn.edu.
