In celebration of Women’s History Month, Her Campus Carleton decided to take a look back and celebrate the women who ran our chapter before us.
Our third Campus Correspondent spotlight is Melanie Ritchot, who relaunched Carleton’s Her Campus chapter alongside her co-CC, Hunza Chaudhary, in 2018. Based in Iqaluit, Melanie is now a reporter for Nunatsiaq News, where she has worked for about a year and a half reporting on the Eastern Arctic, including Greenland, Nunavik, and Nunavut. She also does some freelance magazine writing, photography, and marketing work on the side.
Here, Melanie gives us some insight into her life now as well as some reflections from her time as Her Campus Carleton’s second co-founder and co-CC.
Can you provide a brief summary of what you’ve done since graduating? (Where you’ve travelled, worked, how you got where you are)
After graduating with my bachelor’s degree in journalism I moved into a cute little one-bedroom apartment near Elgin and worked for Health Canada for a few months, but it got monotonous pretty quickly. So, I started applying for journalism jobs and got an offer to report in Haida Gwai, British Columbia. The job wasn’t quite right for me so I declined the offer and accepted one from Nunatsiaq News. I drove to Vancouver Island with my partner and worked remotely from there for a few months before moving to the Arctic. My plan is to head back to Vancouver in the Spring and I’ll be pursuing a master’s degree in publishing in September.
What benefit do you think Her Campus provides for college/university women?
Her Campus was a way for me to work on a passion project while gaining experience that looked good on my resume and gave me plenty of hands-on examples to pull from during job interviews. I also met so many great women in other programs and with different interests than mine who I wouldn’t have met otherwise. The connections I made through HC are so valuable and I now have a running list of powerful women I can reach out to, whether it be for advice or to collaborate on other projects.
What is your favourite memory as CC?
My favourite memory from my time at HC has to be doing an interview with staff from (Her Campus) Headquarters over Zoom while Hunza Chaudhary, my co-correspondent and I, were studying in Prague. We couldn’t miss the interview, which was part of the process of starting the chapter at Carleton, so we took it in a stairwell of the Thomson Reuters building between workshops.
What advice would you have for Carleton women hoping to break into the work industry?
I think knowing your worth and putting yourself out there are two important lessons I’ve learned. You really need to set boundaries with your time and effort at work and you likely won’t be offered what you want without asking for it — whether that’s a mental health day or a raise. Putting yourself out there can also have massive returns (and if it doesn’t, nothing’s lost).
Just recently, I emailed the editor of a magazine I had freelanced for once to say I loved working with her and would be interested in helping on the editorial side of things if something ever opened up, and now we’re discussing me joining the team in an editing and recruiting capacity. You don’t have to wait for the perfect job posting to come up or for your boss to offer you tasks you’re more interested in — ask!