I'm moving to NYC!

Jumper - Shop here

Coat - Shop here

Skirt - Shop here

Bag - Shop here

Well well well it's been a while!! To say alot has happened would be an understatement. My last post was at the end of October and since thing I've started working with Topshop (sorry WHAT) and I've been offered a job in New York. Plz hit rewind. 

So the Topshop thing is massive, to me anyway. Daniel, Caoilfhionn (wearwhatworks) Caoilfhionn Rose and I were all emailed asking if we would like to collab with Topshop and obviously all nearly died with excitement. So basically the craic is that I'll be posting my fave Topshop pieces from the Edinburgh store to hopefully give you some style inspiration. This is hugely exciting and I feel so so lucky to have been asked to work with a brand I've loved for years.

K, onto the next thing. So I never really had any plans after uni I assumed I'd stay in Scotland for a while because I really do love it here and I always said I'd move to London if I had to for my career. I've never been a huge fan of London but would do what I needed to do when it comes to my career. After uni hand ins I found out that I was nominated for a styling award at Graduate Fashion Week and I was the only one from my uni up for an award. Please believe me when I say nobody could've been as shocked as I was. I've always had a serious attitude problem when it came to my uni. I spent most of the time fighting with my lecturer/skiving off/finishing hand ins at the last second. (sorry mum) but nonetheless I was up for an award and we were all showing our work so off we went to London for Graduate Fashion Week. Anyway long story short I ended up winning the award which was absolutely coco loco insano but obviously so so exciting and my mum was delighted which is all I really care about to be honest.

After winning that award and after following bloggers like TarMar and Retroflame I just took the notion that I wanted to move to New York. I've no idea why winning the award sent me onto wanting to move to New York but I guess I just thought if I can win that award I can move to NYC. After plenty of research I worked out that I was eligible for the J1 Intern Visa which is an Irish visa. The conditions of the J1 Intern Visa were that I would have to find a company in a field similar to my degree to say they would take me on as an intern, for exactly 12 months, and pay me (because I don't come from coin and deffo couldn't work unpaid for a year). Let me tell you, finding a company that will take you on without meeting you and wait for you during the 2/3 the visa process was tough.

I must've applied for well over 150 fashion and social media internships and reached out to so many individual people and companies on Linkedin and via email mostly to no avail. By this point I had spent months telling people about my plans to hit the big apple and it seemed like there wasn't a hope in hell of it actually coming to be. 

One night I was reading articles on Irish people who were living and working in NYC. I read about a woman called Frances Mulraney who is a journalist and editor and I reached out to her on Linkedin asking if she had any intern positions available or knew of anyone that did. Frances didn't have any positions but she did tell me to reach out to Digital Irish which is a site dedicated to helping Irish students find work in the US. I shot them an email name dropping Frances and I received a message back from Gavin McMahon who was very kind and sent me links to a J1 chat and a job announcements forum. It was on this forum that I found an intern position for a social media administrator at a technology company. 

After 3 video interviews with 3 different people in the company, plenty of praying (woman of god when I want to be) and a million updates to my mother I got the job! As it stands I'll be gone early January and I'm hoping to move to Brooklyn. I don't think it's fully sunk in yet but I'm not one to think about things too much so I'll cross the bridge when it and see what next year has in store.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk!