Paulina Isaac, a former Owl who came up through the Klein College of Media and Communication Journalism Department, is living the dream. She knew ever since she was in middle school that her dream was to be the top editor of a magazine like Glamour, her favorite at the time. Now she finds herself in leadership at Cosmopolitan magazine as weekend editor, and hustles all week long with bylines in Bustle, The Cut, Well + Good and more.

Isaac walked at Temple’s May 2016 Commencement and majored in journalism with a minor in sociology. As a lifelong writer who spent three years on her high school yearbook staff, she didn’t wait long after her arrival at Klein (then still called the School of Media and Communication) to get involved with Templar Yearbook and HerCampus. Right away, she knew that magazines and magazine writing were her calling, and made haste finding the student publications that were right for her.

“I really wanted to do HerCampus because at that point, I really wanted to develop a voice, and because it was a magazine you had more room to write the way you wanted to write,” she says.

Though she didn’t adhere to a strict magazine track within the journalism program, Isaac used her journalism credits to take writing courses in blogging and travel journalism, and then used as many as she could to get credit for internships at magazines and media outlets all over Philadelphia and New York. She says that this suited her well, and she even chose Klein for its journalism accolades.

“One of the reasons I chose Temple was because of the [journalism] program,” she says.

She began interning in the fall semester of her junior year, when she began at Philadelphia Weekly while also doing voluntary freelance work for College Magazine. Then, in the spring of her junior year, she interned at Philadelphia Magazine while completing her journalism capstone, Philadelphia Neighborhoods, a year early. During the summer between her junior and senior years, Isaac pursued an internship outside of Temple at the Hollywood Reporter in Los Angeles. She says that between the thrill of red carpet coverage and being paid for her work for the first time, Isaac became certain that she would pursue entertainment magazine journalism — whereas before this opportunity, she had considered a career in political journalism.

Following her summer at the Hollywood Reporter, Isaac returned to Temple as a senior. That fall, she took another local internship, this time at Philadelphia Style. She quickly moved on to a winter internship at ELLE in New York, staying with a family friend in the city and commuting to the Hearst offices daily. When spring came along, she applied for and received a Lew Klein Excellence in the Media Scholarship to continue the internship on Mondays and Wednesdays into the spring. To do so, she would rise at the crack of dawn and take Megabus to New York from Temple twice a week, returning late in the evenings.
 
After college, Isaac’s first experience was an internship at Us Weekly during the spring and summer months. After leaving for about two years to pursue opportunities in digital and social media, Isaac briefly returned to Us Weekly in 2019 as an associate editor. Only this time, the magazine was under new ownership, and the internal culture had severely declined.

After taking some time off for health reasons, Isaac was faced with the decision of whether to go back to Us Weekly in June 2020, with a shrunken staff, low morale and a raging global pandemic. When she came across the part-time weekend editor job at Cosmopolitan, she knew it would be the perfect way to move from her nine-to-five (or ten-to-six, in the case of magazine jobs) into freelancing. Now, she feels that having a part-time gig is the perfect way to support herself while having the flexibility to freelance and create her own goals.

“You have so much freedom," she says. “I get to make my own calendar; I can set my own deadlines.”

Now, with some room to breathe, Isaac seems to be thriving in ways she had been working toward for years. Though she fought hard to reach where she is today, her success is no surprise to those who helped her along the way.

“Paulina Isaac was the original go-getter,” says Journalism Professor Larry Stains, who taught Isaac in Introduction to Magazines. “So it did not surprise me one teeny-tiny bit to hear that she’s the weekend editor at Cosmo.”

Yet with all of the deadlines and so much going on, many aspiring writers and editors like Isaac find themselves losing sight of the end goal. To them, she says “Be open to your dream changing. The industry is changing so much; it’s okay to let go of some of those dreams.”