Thrilling Heroics » Anya Kamenetz

ThrillingHeroics.com: The Best Posts of 2007

Cody McKibben — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:00:10 +0000

Read this full article on Thrilling Heroics here: ThrillingHeroics.com: The Best Posts of 2007

Happy Holidays everybody. I wish you all the best and hope that you get a chance to spend some quality time with family and loved ones. If you haven’t heard yet, I am traveling in Spain for the holidays with some good friends, but I wanted to be sure to share my 2007 year-end wrap-up with you here on the blog. If you’ve got the time to visit, I thank you for reading!

Thrilling Heroics in 2007

2007 was a fantastic year for the blog. The site became an early participant in the Washington Post Blogroll program. And many things are still in development for the road ahead, but TH has recently been accepted as one of the first handful of Gen-Y career blogs to join the upcoming Brazen Careerist blog network, which should be a great opportunity. Over the course of the year, I also had the chance to interview several interesting individuals to get their perspective on leadership and success, so that Gen-Y readers can learn from their experience!

Thrilling Heroics has seen a lot of change this year as my personal interests and pursuits have evolved. The discussion is geared more toward personal and career development now than it was at the birth of this blog in 2006, but the central mission is the same: TH is a career-oriented resource aimed at college students and young professionals, with a strong focus on leadership, personal development, productivity, personal finance, entrepreneurship, and “lifestyle design,” with the purpose of inspiring and empowering readers to pursue their wildest dreams! In 2008, you can plan to see some further changes around here in content and design, and you will probably see a few guest writers. Click here to learn more about plans for ’08.

I also have to thank the readers, of course! Thank you for returning week after week. Thank you for your kind words of encouragement, for your patience with me as my direction and obligations change, and for sharing your thoughts on the discussions that take place here. Your comments and your supportive emails keep me going, and they keep the dialogue here interesting! In the next year, I hope to build more community here for you young readers, so please help us to grow the community by sharing the URL with your family, friends, and colleagues. Also, if you are a regular visitor, consider subscribing to the RSS feed to make life easier on yourself. Get posts delivered to your email inbox only when there is fresh new content, so that you don’t waste time visiting the site when there’s nothing new!

Best Posts of 2007

There were 102 posts this year, with over 6,800 unique visitors to the site. We made it onto Tom Peters’ homepage, Yahoo! Finance, and Consumerist.com, among others! This could not have been possible without you, the reader. Thank you! Here are the blog posts that caused the most buzz around the blogosphere this year and inspired the best conversions. Please take a moment to look back at the best of 2007:

2007 Women & Business Interview Series with IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com

A Few More Notable Posts

Happy Holidays!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: ThrillingHeroics.com: The Best Posts of 2007

An Interview with Anya Kamenetz, Author of Generation Debt

Cody McKibben — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 04:32:33 +0000

Read this full article on Thrilling Heroics here: An Interview with Anya Kamenetz, Author of Generation Debt

The Heroines of Personal Finance and Entrepreneurship series continues at IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com with Anya Kamenetz, a young author and columnist for the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, Slate, and Village Voice. Her first book is Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers — And How to Fight Back. Here are a few excerpts from my Q & A with Anya:

You were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for the series “Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young” in 2004. What were your main findings?

Student loans and student credit cards have multiplied very fast and under the radar so that large amounts of debt are now a rite of passage for a majority of young people. Two thirds of college graduates borrow loans to get through college, up from less than half as recently as 1993, and they graduate with an average of $20,000 in loans and almost $3000 in credit card debt. Combine that with a changing job market that offers fewer benefits, and a higher cost of living, especially housing, in many metropolises and you have a lot of middle-class, educated young people falling behind, to say nothing of the fate of McJob Nation; the two out of three kids with no college degree have seriously fallen behind in income and stability.

Since graduating in 2002 you’ve freelanced as a writer and editor for several publications. What are some recommendations you can make for aspiring professional writers?

Think hard about it. I don’t know many “professional writers” as opposed to people who happen to be lucky enough to occasionally get paid to write. Boyce Rensberger, head of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT, told the New York Times on June 10: ”I feel a little queasy encouraging young people into journalism. It’s such a precarious industry right now.”

I think if you want to write for a living you need to be pretty hardcore about your craft and your subject area or field. You can build up knowledge of your field by working a related job (in politics, the law, nonprofits, fashion, etc.) and you can build up your craft by writing, writing, writing, and being in a writers’ group, and taking classes or workshops, and working in media-related fields. I freelanced as a writer’s assistant, fact-checker, and copy editor before I started writing full time. If I were starting out now I would definitely blog too.

Continue reading at IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com: Heroines of Personal Finance and Entrepreneurship #2: Anya Kamenetz. Also be sure to read Anya’s new Yahoo! Finance expert column and grab her book Generation Debt if you’re interested!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: An Interview with Anya Kamenetz, Author of Generation Debt

Interview Series with A Few Prestigious Female Authors

Cody McKibben — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:29:09 +0000

Read this full article on Thrilling Heroics here: Interview Series with A Few Prestigious Female Authors

I’ve been working hard the past two weeks on getting an interview series together for Ramit Sethi’s site IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. We are hosting interviews with authors and experts on women and personal finance/entrepreneurship, so it’s been very interesting so far. The series starts this week, so keep an eye on IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com for more info. Also, I will link to each story as they are published. (Ramit’s site is one of the most popular personal finance blogs on the internet. Pay close attention to the great quality of comments and discussion that arise from each of his posts.)

The panel will include:

Michelle Goodman: Author of The Anti 9 to 5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube
Pamela Slim: Owner of Ganas Consulting and Author of the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog & podcast
Alexandra Levit: Founder of Inspiration@Work career consultancy and Author of They Don’t Teach Corporate in College: A Twenty-Something’s Guide to the Business World
Anya Kamenetz: Author of Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, NoBenefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers–And How to Fight Back
Julie Jansen: Speaker, Coach and Author of I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This and You Want Me To Work With Who?
Barbara Stanny: Speaker, Coach, and Author of Overcoming Underearning and Secrets of Six-Figure Women

Anyone else you guys would like to see interviewed? Let me know your suggestions.

I’m REALLY excited to get to work with Ramit and to learn from so many accomplished professional women. I’ll be busy for the next few weeks with these interviews, but it should be well worth it. Stay tuned for more…

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Interview Series with A Few Prestigious Female Authors