Prof: write a paper on AIDS.
You: that could be interesting, but you know what, I’ve always been much more interested in cancer.
Prof: write a paper on AIDS.
You: ok.
Here is why you should always back down: you’re paying thousands of dollars to take their class. If you decide to be combative, or stand your ground on an issue, they can fail you. I'm not saying a professor actually will fail you, but if you don't do an assignment how they ask you to, they have the ability. If you fail a class, you essentially paid $5,000 for nothing, you have to take the class again for another $5,000, and your GPA drops, not to mention all that time you wasted. Is some random paper or assignment really worth all that?
Which is why I’m writing this post. In class, one of our assignments is to interview an entrepreneur and post the interview to our blog. I did the interview, but explained I didn’t think posting it jived with what I’m going for with this blog. He said post the interview. I posted the interview. He's probably right.
I interviewed Julia Segal, author of 3 of the funnies blogs ever: animalswithcasts JuliaSegal and ihatemyparents here’s what she had to say:
me: hello? juliasegalnyc: hey sorry I was just being lazy and weird about gchatting someone I didn’t know, thanks for getting the ball rolling! Ha. me: ha ha yup. sorry to be a pain in the ass anyways, so the deal is, i have this assignment where i have to have a Q & A w/ someone who has a successful business/blog. It seems like your blog gets some decent traffic, not to mention it cracks me up … so I figured I’d see if you’d be up for answering a few Qs juliasegalnyc: yeah, I haven’t check google stats in a while but I think I get from 6,000 to 10,000 unique hits a day. I can check. Ok fire away! me: ok, so first off, how did you come up with the idea and where did you want to go with it? juliasegalnyc: I had a blogspot blog, but it wasn’t the easiest to upload with etc. my friend suggested tumblr and I started just posting what I though people on there wanted to see, kinda arty hipster bullshit. It wasn’t that great, I realized as a comedian, i just had to post what I liked. I just wanted to get my name out there because I am bad at networking at parties and stuff. me: so do you see the blog as a medium to promote your stand up? and if you do, do you know if it’s helping? like as far as attendance at your stand up comedy gigs go? juliasegalnyc: I would rather be a writer than a stand-up but doing standup gets your work out there. I do get more shows now, but the funny thing is once juliasegal.tumblr was going I started two other tumblrs, animalswithcasts.com and ihatemyparents.tumblr.com they were just kinda fun little jokes to me, but animalswithcasts got a book deal from Chronicle Books, they came to me after seeing the website, so I have been doing less standup and have been trying to finish this book. me: wow, that’s awesome. i didn’t know ihatemyparents was you too it’s so damn funny so how did the whole blog to book deal work out. they literally just called you up one day? juliasegalnyc: thanks yeah, I literally just got an email from Chronicle asking if I wanted to make the website a book. I like doing thejuliasegal.tumblr site the most of course, but that one is a bit tricker to get a book deal through, I am hoping that one gets me a job basically blogging funny pics w/ funny captions, doesn’t everyone want that kind of job! me: wow so you have 3 blogs that get a lot of traffic. besides the book deal, do you currently make any profit from your ventures on the web? juliasegalnyc: No, I don’t advertise on any of them, I may be wrong about that, but from what I hear, google ads etc. only make you like 20 dollars a month, that just doesn’t seem like enough to make my readers have to look at yet another website with ads everywhere. Like I said I may be wrong. I hope I figure out a way to make money off at least juliasegal soon, I have started to notice buzzfeed, holytaco, college humor and other picture sites just taking my pics (even the ones I make) aand slapping their logo at the bottom and not crediting me, so hopefully getting the blog more popular will encourage sites like those not to step on the little people(little blogs) to get popular. me: ya definitely. so more or less you’d like to see books come from the blogs juliasegalnyc: I would like to get a job writing for a show or working for a blog, while coming up with fun books to work on. I have amillion ideas for blogs. me: ok got ya. well, one down! where do you get your content/pictures for your blogs? juliasegalnyc: Thats kinda a secret. I mean, I don’t go to funny picture sites to find them, that seems silly to me. I will say I love looking through peoples flickrs, and I look at lots of threads in forums on websites that other people don’t think of. Like car club websites that have photoshop contests etc. I used to do this thing where I would look up two random words and then just find a google image I liked, my brother and I had a tumblr where we did that, but we stopped updating it. I actually met my boyfriend because i emailed him after randomly finding his flickr page. oh and i make lots of the pics myself w/ photoshop. me: ok well i think that’s it. thanks SO MUCH for letting me bother you juliasegalnyc: no prob me: keep up the good work on your blogs. juliasegalnyc: thanks me: talk to you later
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