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" Alicia Menendez has been a TV host, writer, think tank advisor, radio show anchor, and political commentator. Though she once considered a career in politics, the 31-year-old now hosts of Fusion&amp;#039;s AM Tonight, where her job is to talk to some of the most interesting people in the country about anything from Justin Bieber to discrimination against transgender women. She spoke to Cosmopolitan.com about the importance of patience, leveraging your strengths, and how meeting one person can change everything. I grew up in Union City, N.J. I knew exactly what I wanted to be: I was going to go to law school, and then I was going to run for political office. I grew up in a very working-class community, and I had two English-speaking, college-educated parents, so I grew up very aware that I was much more privileged than most people I was growing up with. I felt like I had a responsibility to be a voice for people who didn&amp;#039;t necessarily have all the privileges that I had. I thought that public service was the best way to effect change. I went to college at Harvard, where I studied women, gender, and sexuality studies, and graduated in 2005. Right after graduation I worked on Jon Corzine&amp;#039;s 2005 campaign for governor of New Jersey as an assistant to the director of research and then to the director of surrogate scheduling. I realized that as much as the campaign would try to set the agenda, it was really the press that determined the conversation. For the first time, it occurred to me that perhaps there was more power being outside of the system rather than inside. While I was working for the Corzine campaign I also worked at a law firm as a paralegal and was studying for the LSAT. I took the test, filled out my application, and then realized I actually had no interest in being an attorney. There are people who are creative and for whom the law is a great place to express that; I wasn&amp;#039;t one of them. So I held my application for a year. Then a year became eight years. After Corzine won, I began working unpaid on my father&amp;#039;s 2006 Senate run along with continuing my work at the law firm. Dad won, and he&amp;#039;s now a senior senator in the state of New Jersey. That job was a bit strange because I cared so much \u2014 how could I ever care as much about a job as I did about that job? It crystalized the fact that right now the political process is about cutting down your opponent and not about who puts the best ideas forward or who represents the needs of a constituency. Those attacks are disappointing on an intellectual level, but when they&amp;#039;re targeted at someone you know and love, they are incredibly hurtful. It made me realize that public service is an extreme privilege, but it also comes at an extreme price. Once that campaign was over, I decided I really wanted to work in media. It was important to me to get that job myself and not use any connections. I found a job at RNN TV, which is a station in Westchester, N.Y. I applied for a job as a booker, meaning it was my job to book guests. I was living in Manhattan on the west side, I had to get to Grand Central, and I would take an hour-long train ride up to Westchester, and then I had to take a shuttle. There were times I didn&amp;#039;t have enough cash to pay the monthly pass for Metro North, so I would have to cobble together enough dollar bills to pay for a single-day ticket. They let me start producing, where I would write and conceptualize segments. Then they let me do some on-air stuff, which was great, because you really don&amp;#039;t know if you can do that unless you try it. The first time I did an on-air test at RNN, I was terrified. I did my own makeup, and I wore an oversize brown pantsuit to look more mature. I don&amp;#039;t even remember what I read off the prompter. All I remember is that the news director said, &amp;quot;I really think you can do this.&amp;quot; I was still grappling with where I could have the greatest influence. So in 2008, I moved to D.C. and worked for Rock the Vote. I was their political outreach manager; I created pie charts all day.  From there I went to an organization called Democracia USA, a national Hispanic civil engagement program based in Miami, although I worked out of the D.C. office. I was there from 2009 to 2010, and I did their outreach and communications. While I was there, I got to do a lot of cable and political commentary for them. I was in this place where I had a job and my job paid me and my job was to do nonprofit communications, but I was trying to build a side gig in media.  When I worked at RNN TV, I met someone who ran a booking business. He would pitch guests for shows, but if a network was looking for someone to speak on a specific topic, he would try to find the guest as well. No one ever wants to do guest spots around the holidays, so on Thanksgiving 2008, when I was in between gigs at Rock the Vote and Democracia USA, he called and said a cable news show needed a political talking head, and was I interested in doing it? Anyone who had any self-respect would have said no because it was Thanksgiving Day, but I said yes. Once I got a little bit of airtime, the requests became steady. It&amp;#039;s so hard to get on, but once you&amp;#039;re in a booker&amp;#039;s Rolodex, you&amp;#039;re there. Once I had relationships with some bookers, if I saw a topic in the news I wanted to talk about, then I would pitch myself. Retrospectively, I was not nearly as aggressive as I should have been. The problem with being a guest is you are always trying to fit into a preexisting box \u2014 a show wants someone to talk about X issue, so you fit what you want to say into X issue. You&amp;#039;re never saying, &amp;quot;Hey, I have a lot of thoughts about this other thing.&amp;quot; I always felt like I was bothering people when I presented my own ideas. Having been a booker, I understood how their jobs worked \u2014 they need a person in that seat. After that initial media spot, there were four years where I was working full time and trying to build a media platform. Then for two years I was at a think tank in D.C. called NDN where I did immigration policy and demographic analysis. All through those years, I was doing cable television on the side, running my own blog, and writing for anyone who would pay me $10. In the summer of 2011, executives at the National Latino Broadcasting Network reached out to me about cohosting a radio show. I jumped on the opportunity and assisted in finding my cohost, Bettina Inclan. We hosted the radio show with Sirius XM, which began in the last few months I was at NDN and continued once I left. I was writing for a few publications, including NBC Latino. And then I was doing some TV hosting on the side for local projects, including promotional showcases for nonprofit events and a show called &amp;quot;Comcast Newsmakers.&amp;quot; By having five or six part-time jobs, I felt like I had enough security to leave my full-time job and really focus on doing media. I started thinking about branding and how I was going to transition from what was largely political commentary to a broader base. I consistently checked in with all of the professional contacts I made along the way. I tried to parlay my writing on NBC Latino into TV appearances on MSNBC. I started to ask why I wasn&amp;#039;t under contract on the shows I was already appearing on, because they will not pay you for as long as you are willing to work unpaid. The scary part was that I knew to really have leverage, you really have to be willing to walk away, and if you&amp;#039;re like me and not independently wealthy, that means you need another option. I started to be more selective about what I did. There was a period time where if anyone called, I would take the gig. I started thinking more critically about what it was I wanted to be putting out there.  I really wanted to prove that I could do more than politics, so I also looked for opportunities that focused on pop culture. Even in my writing, I tried to make a pivot to more socio-cultural issues. When I was booked on political topics, I would try to find a cultural entry point that I could speak to instead of remaining only in the politics box. In my real life I am interested in politics, yes, but I&amp;#039;m also interested in pop culture, I&amp;#039;m interested in all those conversations we have with our friends about sex, about money, about relationships. I needed to reintroduce myself to people in that way. I don&amp;#039;t know how many pilots I&amp;#039;ve done. Ensemble pilots, duo pilots, some for cable, some not, and every time I would get called in for auditions, I would psych myself out that this was the time. Even when I walked away being like, &amp;quot;That felt funky. I don&amp;#039;t think I would actually want to do that every day,&amp;quot; I was so desperate for a break that I would put all my eggs in every basket I was given, and then I would have a terrible fallout every time it didn&amp;#039;t work out. There were a lot of times when people wouldn&amp;#039;t even follow up or close the loop or say you were too tall or too young or we really need a blonde. People are afraid of being honest, of saying, &amp;quot;You blew it,&amp;quot; or, &amp;quot;You were nervous,&amp;quot; or, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re too young,&amp;quot; which is not really about age but is more about saying you don&amp;#039;t have enough perspective yet. Just as often I would meet people who put too much emphasis on expertise and showed a lack of appreciation for perspective. I remember one meeting with an executive who was like, &amp;quot;Sure, you&amp;#039;re young and you&amp;#039;re smart, but what do you know?&amp;quot; It was like, &amp;quot;I know my experience in the world, and that has to count for something. &amp;quot; The place where this story gets interesting is when I met a talent executive at CNN named Josanne Lopez in 2010. She had seen me on other cable channels and reached out to say, &amp;quot;I really like you and I think you could be better than you are and you should do TV.&amp;quot; The timing didn&amp;#039;t work at CNN, but when she got hired to be the executive producer at HuffPost Live in 2012, I was one of the first people she brought in for an audition.  That was a several-years-long relationship we cultivated before she was ever able to hire me. For me, being ambitious and being impatient, that was a long time to wait. I would tell my boyfriend all the time, &amp;quot;We shouldn&amp;#039;t buy a bookshelf. I may be moving to New York any minute to work!&amp;quot; I said it so often it became a joke. That&amp;#039;s what no one tells you \u2014 unless you are incredibly lucky, getting the right job will take longer than you want it to take, and you can&amp;#039;t force the moment at which it happens. It worked out for me. There were four months in which I was doing freelance gigs, and then I got hired at HuffPost Live in May of 2012 and moved to New York. HuffPost Live was such a perfect platform, because you would do a segment on international affairs and then talk about wedding planning. I&amp;#039;d do anywhere from two to four segments a day. Then there were nights like Election Night when we were on the air for hours. The HuffPost pitch process was very collaborative \u2014 sometimes I&amp;#039;d pitch conversations based off something I&amp;#039;d read, and sometimes I&amp;#039;d be assigned a segment that another producer had pitched. When I started at HuffPost Live, I knew they wanted to break from the format of cable news and broadcast, but the only on-air talents I could look to as models were on cable news and broadcast. So when we&amp;#039;d rehearse prior to launch, I&amp;#039;d do my best impersonation of a newscaster. Josanne did not let that fly. I remember one conversation where she pulled me aside and said, &amp;quot;I hired you to be you. Why are you pretending to be someone else?&amp;quot; I cried. She also did not let that fly. She made me go back to it. But I couldn&amp;#039;t get out of TV mode \u2014 formal, glossy, artificial. Finally Josanne suggested we just try chats among the hosts. In that format, freed from the technical elements of prompter and remote guests, I finally understood what she wanted and what the format required. I had worked so hard, for so long to be taken seriously and to overcome the bias against being young that I had buried all of the things that made me unique. Josanne undid that. Now don&amp;#039;t get me wrong \u2014 I made a million mistakes. I obsess about them every time I can&amp;#039;t sleep. I had interviews I underprepared for \u2014 it&amp;#039;s difficult to manage one to two hours of freewheeling deep-dive conversations on two to four different subjects. HuffPost Live wanted us to have a take on the story, and after years on cable news, I sometimes conflated perspective with choosing a side, as though all issues exist in a binary. I called guests by the wrong names. I read off the wrong prompter. Does the Type A in me want to pretend none of these things happened? Absolutely. Would I be on my way to getting better without having acknowledged and learned from those mistakes? Absolutely not. At the same time, the fact that it was a startup meant I was gaining exposure to what a media startup looks like, and learning lessons like content is important, but at the end of the day, this is a business. I&amp;#039;m not sure that knowledge impacted my day-to-day job as much as it changed my appreciation for why decisions get made, the timeline they get made on, and where the needs of talent and producers fall in the hierarchy of the model. For example, it&amp;#039;s really easy to be snobby about celebrity coverage, but people like celebrities. They read celebrity stories and they watch celebrity video, so if you want to reach people with your more intellectual content, it may need to be paired with something that is light and fun and entertains. Fusion was staffing up, and in 2013 they approached me about coming to host. The conversation started out like, &amp;quot;Do you want to be a part of this? We don&amp;#039;t know what it would look like,&amp;quot; and as time went on, it became much more specific \u2014 you will have a show, you will be the only host of it, it will be on prime time. Sometimes you can&amp;#039;t force things. The HuffPost Live opportunity was in many ways tailor-made for me. They were looking for someone who wasn&amp;#039;t too broadcast and wasn&amp;#039;t too cable, someone who hadn&amp;#039;t yet developed good or bad habits. Maybe there wasn&amp;#039;t an opportunity for me until 2012 when that was founded. Similarly, the Fusion thing couldn&amp;#039;t have happened any sooner because Fusion didn&amp;#039;t exist sooner. I joined the Fusion network in June 2013, and it launched in October. I moved to Miami, which was a really tough decision. I was leaving my family, my closest friends, and perhaps most importantly, public transportation! But my fianc\u00E9 happens to be from Miami so he was very excited. That helped tip me over. At the same time, going to Fusion itself was a no-brainer. We have the opportunity to do something no one else has done \u2014 to combine the power of digital and television content creation for an entire generation. How could I turn that down? But I still miss having friends and subways and good pizza.  If you want to succeed in this industry, it helps to have a really good sense of self. Know what you&amp;#039;re good at and what you uniquely bring to the table. I had other offers to be a reporter; I probably would have been a terrible reporter. There are people who are so gifted at telling a story from out in the field; that&amp;#039;s not my thing. Differentiating what you&amp;#039;re good at from the opportunities that come your way can be a hard thing to wrestle with, but it&amp;#039;s worth it. Now my job is to create something with a team of talented and fun young people. Because we live in a digital age, we get feedback immediately, so it feels like we&amp;#039;re actually interfacing with our audience. It feels like there are times where we get to move the conversation. I had a commentary piece on Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey&amp;#039;s Golden Globe speeches, which questioned why neither of them talked about HIV/AIDS, and it started up a conversation online. It&amp;#039;s awesome when you have a perspective and an idea that stimulates discussion. That to me is infinitely interesting and rewarding. No one in this age exists on one platform, so if you want to work in media, try everything. I&amp;#039;ve done radio, I&amp;#039;ve done television, I&amp;#039;ve done print, I&amp;#039;ve done web, I&amp;#039;ve done livestreaming digital. I feel like I&amp;#039;m where I can have the biggest impact right now. And after years of fighting just for the chance to have that opportunity, there&amp;#039;s no looking back.  RELATED: Get That Life: How I Became a Food Radio Host Get That Life: How I Became a Correspondent for Good Morning America Get That Life: How I Became a Professional Cheese Eater Get That Life: How I Founded Jezebel and Became a New York Times Columnist  Follow Jill on Twitter. Photo Credit: Fusion "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/advice/a28518/alicia-menendez-get-that-life/>