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Awards and Achievements
Beta Gamma Sigma
for Academia
National Honor Society
2015
2015
Excellence in Jazz
Performance
2015
Chorus Leader of
Select Choir
2015
Excellence in
I.B. Spanish
2014 and 2015
Excellence in
I.B. English Literature
2014
Harvard Book Prize
2014
Experience
Emerald Media Group
Radio Show Host
May 2020 to Present
TVM: Student Television
at McGill
General Member
September 2019 to May 2020
cKUT 90.3 FM
An academic steeped in literary flare.
A journalist with six years' experience in print and broadcast.
A non-profit leader for mental health rights.
It seemed she was dealt a bad hand with nothing left to gamble on--a first year of high school curdled by poor grades, domestic strife, and a doomsday mentality. But Paige was too young, perhaps too naive, to know defeat's stare. In 2013, riding the slow decline of the blog format, she created Asking Jude, a tele-memoir of the monochromatic days she lived in as a high school outcast.
But her lifetime as a memoirist lasted what seemed to be only a few short hours, its clockwork shaken to pieces by the many users who turned to her as lost and confused as she was. The way their stories moved around hers, she wanted to be the person in their lives that she didn't have in hers: she wanted to be their supporter. As she did, that chaos of adolescence did not touch her, did not know her. It was a blog for less than a year, an advice column for over two years, and a mental health initiative and undergraduate psychology internship for the remaining years of the future. This was the passing glance of success long awaiting.
When the age of sixteen said its prologue, the age of seventeen shouted a beginning: She was ready to become a student. Paige knew the grades that spelled her freshman and sophomore years were not her barcode. In her junior year, playing the hopscotch of school transfers, she enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program. She rode in like a dark horse, top scores following her wherever her discipline lead.
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Her extracurriculars were no less impressive, establishing a charity clothes drive for the Kenmore county shelters within a few months after transferring and achieving titles like choral soprano leader, leading actor, and piano prodigy during her first year. She graduated, one of the successful seven out of twenty-five applicants to receive both high school and I.B. diplomas. As she sang the national anthem during that convocation, she seemed to have graduated from adolescence as well.
And yet, the American university system was a beast she had yet to master. The laughing failures of those beginning years rewrote her admissions essay like a joke book, and she was denied her top choices for undergraduate programs. Settling with a private university in Washington, D.C., she began her exploits in print journalism. Industrious almost to a fault, she became a writer for American Word Magazine and Second Chance, Inc. and copyeditor and reviewer for AMLit Magazine.
In her spare summers, she attended programs at U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A., learning things her major called useless but that she loved all the same. Though admissions rejection letters were a knee-high something she waded through in high school, her academic and extracurricular spoils were reaped when she was accepted into McGill University, a public Canadian university ranked thirty-first in the world.
She let D.C. fall behind her alongside other fever dreams. But leaving American University for the government werewolves also meant leaving the honeypot of D.C. journalism. A Montrealer's journalism was a bare string between two cans, with what little opportunity present given a bilingual preference she didn't have. McGill turned any crumb of opportunity left into a dazed yarn ball, the student newspapers but the disorganized efforts of a school who believed in communications only as a theory.
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*Paige Gilmar
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She had her self-made curriculum in her bottom drawer, becoming a writer for FINE Living and Dining Magazine, Fashion 360 Magazine, and Budget Your Trip, Inc. She also graduated from writer to editor for Trend Privé Magazine's Humanitarian section, interviewing such non-profit pundits as the founder of Farm Sanctuary and the communications director of the Trevor Project. By some trick of luck, she was even given the privilege to judge the BookLife Prize for Publishers Weekly.
Nearing graduation with the mixed mind of two B.A.s in psychology and English literature, the novelty of print wore off to a surprise nudging at dismay. The totalitarian rule in which editors had over writers, often sentencing talented journalists to a middle schooler's dialect, as well as the thankless nature of hiding behind a printed name made her sick to death.
On a plane ride back from New York, almost cinematic, her mother mentioned broadcast journalism and that print sickness became a broadcast hunger. She became a general member of TVM: Student Television at McGill and a content editor for Montreal's alternative radio station, cKUT-FM 90.3 FM. Upon graduation, she already had her own show, "The Sober Truth," with Emerald Media Group, discussing and interviewing victims of the "War on Drugs" and a slanted judicial system.
In the middle-class limbo between pauper and prince, she stuffs her dreams of graduate school with a piggy bank sick of maybe's. But the self-made man wasn't malnourished with only a diet of dreams--money speaks too. A private tutor since her days of I.B. extended essays, she bartered the pressure of the freelance artist for formal teaching companies. To qualify, she earned her 120-Hour TESOL Certificate in order to teach English to as many age groups as there are countries.
She has worked for such well-known ESL companies, such as VIPKid, Magic Ears, and iTutorGroup. She currently works for Prep Academy Tutors, a Montreal-based teaching company, and Varsity Tutors, where she teaches a platter of subjects, such as Shakespeare, advanced English literature, the general sciences, and more. She now has gained admittance into one of North America's journalism programs: New York University.
But what does this rather self-indulgent biography mean? It means she put a collar on life and called it hers. It means she is imperfect, a touch too human, but with flaws arched to be taught a better way. It means she is ready now, someone more than what she once was.
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It means she is ready for your network.
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