Days of the Condé: Confessions of a former GQ intern

It’s the end of an era, a goodbye to dream internships for magazines like Vogue. But was it ever worth it?

For those trying to get a foot in the door of the magazine business, one very important door has slammed shut. Last month, publishing behemoth Condé Nast terminated its internship program a few months after two interns sued for low or unpaid labor. The news might as well have been that the Empire State Building stopped elevator service. As Google’s HQ might be to an I.T. professional and El Bulli before its recent closing might have been to a chef, Condé Nast was Mount Olympus for lifestyle journalists. Its gods were its 25 titles, each exalted by its respective peoples, from fashion markswomen (Vogue) to serious intellectuals (The New Yorker).

The Ivy grad school I’d gotten into was merely a cover for why I left for New York two years ago. To me, Condé was New York. My waking dreams of the city revolved around the company’s revolving doors, where I would walk into a job at GQ and deploy the wisecracks and wisdom I absorbed from the magazine’s pages since preteenhood. The week of school orientation, classmates spent an afternoon bonding over happy hour drinks but I took the subway down to Times Square. Amid LED screens and all America’s neon dreams flashing left and right, there stood mine: the gray, Gattacan monolith that was the Condé Nast building. I spent a minute staring up at it before focusing on its lobby, visible through a frontage of glass and steel, illuminated but forbidding. I gazed intently at its doors, declaring that one day, I was going to walk through them.

Since college, I had three years of editorial experience behind me but in New York, I was back in school and starting over. An unknown byline from a little-heard-from country wasn’t going to get me into GQ. And as three e-mails to various editors went unanswered, I would realize that no matter how heartfelt your cover letter was, applicants were noticed only when applicants were needed.

Halfway through the school year, a window into the Condé citadel had finally cracked open: a career services e-mail announced GQ’s search for spring interns. Fingers cold and rigid that winter morning, I set my nth e-mail application into motion: the digital equivalent of a humble bow and brag. The next day, I got a reply from the magazine’s editorial assistant, asking if I was available for an interview. I must have spent 20 minutes convulsing on the floor after that, convinced that if I died there and then, I’d be perfectly content.

The doors at Condé didn’t budge easily when you entered them. Their heft was a constant reminder of how monumental interning for one of their magazines was. After two interviews at GQ, only two were chosen for the task. I don’t know what it was about mine that landed me the gig, only that GQ’s deputy editor Michael Hainey, a grave man the editorial assistants had warned me about, seemed to like my stories of struggle, from sharing a bathroom with five older brothers to a summer working at a Thai chicken farm.

During the interview, Hainey had emphasized assistance over expectations, which was all fine and dandy for someone who used to say he didn’t mind if he ended up a janitor at Condé. Two days a week, I was at school and for three, this peon slipped into his best button-downs and brogues to serve the tie bar-clad noblemen of GQ. But while I expected a deluge of work to come my way, the first few weeks were about me proving I could even be entrusted with any work.

A few strides from the sleek office pods of senior editors, I occupied a central cubicle that made me feel like a benched teammate witnessing an exciting game unfold: higher-up editors had Pentagon-grade discussions about the latest issue in a transparent “aquarium” office while lower-rung editors were on the phone with Domenico Dolce or Judd Apatow. I was dressed, ready to impress, and the guy who was slapping shipping labels on packages.

After a month proving I was an above-average Googler and competent with a copy machine, a senior editor who knew about the Philippines from a trip to El Nido began warming up to me. Assigned to do research on a football star prone to rage blackouts, I dug deep for evidence of teen temper; tasked to transcribe six interviews with baseball personalities, I double-checked terms used in a sport I knew nothing about; asked to contact the manager of porn star James Deen, I coughed up a personal e-mail address after contacting a slew of sketchy adult industry folk.

The idea was that no matter what scraps I was thrown, it was my duty to make masterpieces out of them. To me, it didn’t matter that clerical work often dipped into menial work — locating a food truck to get falafels for EIC Jim Nelson, say, or commuting to “Style Guy” Glenn O’ Brien’s apartment to pick up a bunch of pocket squares. I took pride in the dead toenail I got from carrying eight heavy suits while running in tasseled loafers. I didn’t even care about the measly $500 compensation I would get after four months of work.  

An intern needs to value their company enough to be its bitch for a significant amount of time, but emerge with work you are proud to forgo a paycheck for. If my superiors had truly understood this, maybe there would have been more opportunities for such work. Instead, I found myself having to create those opportunities. The few articles I got up on the GQ website were born from many a painful pitch, where editors responded either lukewarmly or not at all.

These were the days where a dogged Melanie Griffith in Working Girl and Lady Gaga’s Marry the Night became guilty sources of empowerment. Determined, I began to see every lowly task I got as a way to shame editors into listening. After transcribing an editor’s lengthy Chris Hemsworth interview, I pitched a feature on comeback star James Van Der Beek that was soon published. Using coffee runs as a means to swing by editors’ offices, I followed up on unanswered pitches. I pursued ideas the editors hadn’t even considered: interviews with the boys of HBO’s Girls and one with Pinoy Top Chef Dale Talde. A trickle of bylines followed but I was exhausted. As summer drew near and the option to extend my internship was presented, the sound of other peoples’ interviews began to feel like aural rape and I was ready never to see another pocket square again.

Recently, I saw a fellow GQ intern’s byline in the masthead of Details magazine, another Condé title. She was now the assistant to the magazine’s editor in chief. Two years holding down a waitressing job in order to continue interning for little to no pay had finally paid off. That industry fairy tale of the Condé intern who gets hired had come true for her. With the company shutting down its internship program, it was now a myth.

Interning at Condé for me had been an investment. More than adding a great line to the CV that led to a run of decent freelance work and a respectable copywriting gig thereafter, it taught me resilience and that if I truly believe in an idea — James Van Der Beek included — I’ll find a way to execute it. At the lowest level of employment, you’re forced to learn persistence and that work really is its own reward. If you’re not getting that at your dream internship, then it’s time to look for another gig. Or another dream.