Jen A. Miller Consulting

Category: And her Crew

6 Ways to Keep Your Crew Connected

How to Stay Connected When Your Closest Friends Live Far Away

Staying in touch with your best friends after college can prove to be a real challenge. It’s not that we want to let these relationships go, it’s just that keeping them tight-knit becomes much more difficult post-graduation. It’s easy to take for granted how effortless it is to stay on top of every detail of our best friends’ lives while we’re in college. We are constantly surrounded by the girls we care most about. Sharing classes, apartments, dining halls, and gyms makes it easy to bump into one another and catch up at a moment’s notice. When we’re thrust into the real world staying connected doesn’t come so easily. We graduate, move, and start forming new lives apart from our closest crews.

Yet, as difficult as it may be, keeping up these relationships is important for many of us. These are the girls that knew us in our crazy years. The ones who helped us get into our best relationships and out of our worst ones. The friends who we pulled all night-ers with in the library and at the bars. They are the girls that know us best and that no matter what will always be our closest crew.

To help you keep the those relationships ties as strong as ever, we’ve got 6 tricks to keep you and your crew connected no matter how much distance keeps you apart. Check our list and then share your tops tips with us!

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May 26, 2014
I Was Unfriended on Facebook

Maggie Winterfeldt Clark of The Editorialite learned an unexpected lesson when she was unfriended on Facebook

I’ve been unfriended on Facebook. The sting is sharper than I expected. Here’s how I knew it happened…

I was browsing through my timeline the other day, as I often do to procrastinate first thing in the morning, when I came upon a friend’s picture from the weekend. In it, a group of smiling faces gathered around an outdoor grill. While I had only met most of the people in the group once or twice, two of them I knew and was Facebook friends with—or so I thought.

“I haven’t seen anything about her in at least a year. I wonder how she’s doing,” I said to myself as I looked at one of the two. I clicked on her name and was taken to a limited profile; mutual friends, profile picture only, “hm, that’s strange. She must’ve instated strict privacy settings,” I thought, still not getting it. “I wonder if she became a school teacher or a CIA agent.”

Then, I saw it; a looming +1 next to a hovering rectangle asking me if I wanted to “Add friend.” My heart skipped a beat as the realization hit: I’ve been unfriended.

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May 19, 2014
It Takes Two: Famous Best Friends We Love

A Look at 10 of our Favorite Famous Best Friends & What They’ve Taught Us

Best friends. We love them, we cherish them, and we couldn’t make it through life without them. In honor of the girls we call our besties we’re taking a look at the on-screen dynamic duos who have taught us a thing or two about life, love, and friendship. From TV friends to real-life friends these females remind us why we love our inner circle.

We also love these duos for not portraying women as catty and cutthroat which the media has a sad tendency to do all too often in today’s “reality” driven world. Because really, we know that true friendship is about building each other up not tearing one another down. Whether it’s a phone call in the middle of the night to talk us out of (or into) quitting or jobs, a bar buddy for happy hour, or a cheerleader to get you through the crazy hard bootcamp you both signed up for, your best friends are the ones who are there to make your life all that much better.

It was tough to narrow down the list but here’s a look at our 10 favorite famous best friends and the lessons they’ve taught us about friendship.

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May 15, 2014
What I Love About My City | Washington D.C.

Emily Woods Gives Us Her View from the Hill on Life in our Nation’s Capital

If you’ve ever watched House of Cards (and let’s be serious, who hasn’t??) then you’ve probably wondered what life is actually like on Capital Hill. Is it all a carefully crafted political chess game like Frank Underwood implies? The Netflix show certainly had us wondering. To get the insider’s scoop I turned to my college girl friend Emily Woods who has lived Washington D.C. since July 2012. This go-getter moved to the city after graduating from the University of Cincinnati with her Masters in Architecture and an MBA (that’s right, this super sista doubled teamed her grad degrees!). Ever since she’s been rocking out life on the east coast as an architect at one of the country’s leading hospitality design firms. I sat down with her to find out what it’s like to be a Single Girl in the city, if politics really ruled all, and what the perfect day looks like in our nation’s capital. Secret- politics may play a crucial role in the conversation but a great glass of wine doesn’t fall far behind : ) Read on to find out more from this D.C-er! (more…)

April 30, 2014
On Burning Out

Catherine shares the story of her wake-up call and tips on avoiding burn-out

PHOTO: JJ Jumoc-Casas.

A friend and I were talking about people’s different thresholds of “busy.” She has a full-time office job and teaches fitness classes 3 to 4 days a week. A colleague of mine has a full-time job, teaches an extracurricular class once a week, oh, and has a husband and four kids to care for. I attest my own desire to fill my days to my early training in elementary school. My mom had my sisters and me in after-school activities galore—from ballet to swimming, speed reading (an excuse for me to spend more time at the library) to student council. Once I left school for the real world, I felt the need to continue being “involved”… I became my high school alumni association’s class representative, joined my sorority’s alumni chapter and took on a leadership role, then found other ways to use my marketing knowledge by joining my sister’s company’s team part time and decided to get back into writing by launching The Single Diaries with Jen.

The only sure thing is that we have 24 hours in a day and, when you have an inflexible office job, you have to wake up at a certain time every morning. For someone like me who can stay up all night, it is a challenge to stay committed to a bedtime when I can find other things I want to do but didn’t have time to earlier in the day (write or edit a post, read a book, watch Melrose Place). There were evenings when after work I thought I could do it all: run off to an early barre class, stop by a book club meeting, then finish editing a post scheduled to go up the next day. Other days I had to make sacrifices. Instead of organizing a boozy brunch (one of my favorite pastimes), I committed to a Saturday work session at a local cafe.

Jen recently wrote about taking up a side hustle, which is great in the years after college when making money needs to be your priority to pay for student loans and to get your feet off the ground. In those years, most of us need to work a traditional full-time job to learn the value of a paycheck and to garner experience to build our resume. A side hustle is a way for you to find your passion and develop the skills you need to make your dreams a reality. But what happens when your full-time job and your side hustle leave you with little to no free time?

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April 25, 2014