“It was really stressful,” Sydney said. “I waited until after APs, and journalism isn’t my strong suit.” As her deadline closed in, she got help from the copy editing team, who polished her articles in the final stretch. One of them told her she could Slack any time she needed something. By June, she’d written the magazine’s cover story herself, along with two additional features.
“I’m going to take a lot of what I learned about layouts, structure, and copy editing into producing our paper,” she told me confidently.
Olivia wasn’t the only student bringing those lessons back to school. Kevin, a student from the Bronx, serves as vice president of StuyCast, Stuyvesant High School’s student media organization. He had already learned Premiere Pro through editing videos for fun, but said CondéFuture strengthened a different set of skills.
“As vice president I’m very busy. I’m not always out taking photos; I do a lot of directing of people,” he said. “CondéFuture helped me on the interpersonal side.”
Kevin wasn’t the only student who found that the program strengthened his communication and interpersonal skills. “CondéFuture gave me way more experience with public speaking than school does,” Elaina admitted. “I learned how to actually prepare for a presentation instead of reading off a script or staring at my notes.”
Changing mindsets
Alice, a student from Staten Island, changed her mindset around internalizing criticism. “Before CondéFuture, I never took critique well. I thought it was a personal attack. Whenever someone critiqued my art, I’d tell people I was fine, but it made me doubt myself a lot,”After receiving difficult feedback on a video with audio and editing issues, she found herself receiving the comments differently than she would have at the start of the year.
“[The project] was so bad, but after, I was like, I don’t feel that bad about the criticism anymore,” she said. “Deep down I know the people critiquing me want the best for me…Why should I not want critique when I’m getting it from people I look up to?”
Support from Condé Nast professionals
Several Condé staff mentors left lasting impressions on students because of the time they chose to invest.
“There was mutual trust and respect,” Elaina said. “They had bigger expectations of us, in a good way. We were treated like adults.”
Many students pointed to Dawn, a senior copy editor, who has been a CondéFuture volunteer since the first cohort.
During a particularly stressful stretch of junior year, Alice was struggling to come up with an idea for one of her video assignments while juggling school and extracurriculars. Dawn sat with her, listened, and shared her own experiences managing stress. Months later, after reading Alice’s near-finished articles for her magazine, Dawn told her how thoughtful her work was.
“I was never that confident in my writing before,” Alice said. “Hearing someone who does this for a living compliment my work made me so much more confident about my writing as a whole – even writing my personal statement for college applications.”
When asked why she continues to volunteer for this program, Dawn stated that “CondéFuture is everything that’s good in the world. I’m grateful to have a job I love, so I like to pay that forward, especially for young people, who are growing up at a tough time. This year’s cohort seemed more concerned about AI, but I loved every chance to tell them that it can never be better than what they offer. Each one of them is a visionary, bright, beautiful, messy, and totally irreplaceable.”
Ava found similar generosity from Jennet, the Editorial Assistant for Allure and SELF, who came into the office on a summer Friday, when many employees work remotely, simply to watch the students at work in-studio day.
“She didn’t have to come in, but she wanted to be part of the process and see our work, which was really empowering,” Ava said.
During one studio photography session, Kevin struggled to assemble a cyclorama before asking Jon, Director of Studio Operations, for help. Together they positioned lights and built the setup from the ground up.
“You can watch YouTube videos on how to set those up,” Kevin said, “but it’s harder to actually learn and remember without in-person experience.”
Solidifying career goals
Students also met professionals whose career paths expanded their own sense of what was possible. During a shadowing day at Astor House, for the 2026 Met Gala’s “Getting Ready With…” video productions, Olivia, who is interested in both journalism and acting, spoke with Natasha, a Director of Video Content and a production mentor for the students that day, who had studied theater before moving into media.
“Hearing someone speak about an experience that I might have in the future was inspiring because it showed me there’s not just one path into a field,” she said. “Just because theater is a hard industry doesn’t mean I can’t find a place for it in my life while also exploring media.”
A lifelong Vogue reader who once covered her walls with magazine covers, Olivia now plans to study journalism in college.
Jerniya had spent years imagining a future in medicine because it felt practical and familiar. Applying to CondéFuture required submitting a self-curated video. “It felt so real and personal to me, sharing a part of myself,” she said. By the end of the year, she had begun planning for a career in film as a producer or director.
“Part of me always knew I wanted to do something creative,” she said. “I didn’t let myself say it.”
Alice’s ambitions shifted too. She entered hoping to become a fashion illustrator. Watching conversations about everything from layouts to marketing decisions convinced her to pursue fashion marketing and business instead.
Ryan’s career goal of becoming an entrepreneur stayed the same. The people around him changed his perspective. “I learned a lot about myself, my hobbies, and importantly who I want to surround myself with,” he said.
“A speaker this year who stuck with me was one of the Senior Video Editors [Estan], whose career I aspire to have one day,” he said. “He said his motivation to pursue his passion is that he likes to tell a story. Those were simple words, but given what I was learning about finding motivation at that point in my life, they meant much more.”
In June, the cohort presented their finished magazines, complete with original photo shoots, articles, ads, and video content, to an audience of Condé Nast employees, family, and friends.
What’s next?
Twelve rising seniors with their own names in a masthead. Next year, they do it again. They get to take what they learned about media careers from year 1 into individual capstone projects where they are paired 1-to-1 with Condé Nast employee mentors. We can’t wait to see what they create next!
