When Julie McMahon was eight years old, she created and wrote The McMahon Weekly, a newspaper to keep her ailing grandfather updated on her life after he moved from her hometown of Stamford, N.Y. to Long Island.
Fast forward 12 years, and McMahon, now a junior English major, is set to become the next editor-in-chief of The Lamron. She is relatively undaunted by the position's workload, which is understandable upon recognizing that McMahon works nonstop.
"I like working, I like being busy … like, very busy," she said. McMahon said that she first started working when she was 15 years old, waiting tables at the quaint, family-owned T.P.'s Café in Stamford. She extolled the café's "awesome pancakes" with real maple syrup, but mainly was appreciative of the close-knit environment of the restaurant.
"They were like family to me," she said. "That's the reason I like working at a restaurant, actually, because I always have." McMahon currently waits tables at Omega Grill on Route 20A and will be working at Club 41 over the summer.
McMahon was quick to bring up her experiences in high school; she graduated with only 23 students, and stayed in the same building from kindergarten through 12th grade. She said the school's size made it easy to get involved in extracurricular activities, and she certainly took advantage of the opportunity. McMahon was the captain of her soccer and basketball teams, played boys' tennis (there was no girls' team), was the lead of her school play three times, served as president of her school's honor society and, with the help of a teacher, started a literary magazine, Muse.
"I was terrible at soccer, though," McMahon chuckled.
Upon enrolling at Geneseo, McMahon went straight to the Lamron office to apply for an assistant copy editor position. She won the position and spent the year editing news articles. She was elected the paper's copy editor the next fall, and served as the managing editor position that spring. This year, McMahon brought the Arts & Entertainment section to new heights as a section editor.
McMahon said that she loves The Lamron and the opportunities it affords to Geneseo students. "We have a communication department but we don't have a real journalism program, a hands-on one, which is why I think The Lamron is so awesome, because it offers that to students," she said.
McMahon is keeping her goals for the paper tempered, for now. "I don't want to have such lofty goals that they aren't reachable," she said. "I think having a small publication and having it be super-high quality is [better than] trying to make it something bigger than this college can allow for."
Her personal goals bear the same brand of lofty realism. McMahon said that she plans to become a lawyer, but also pointed to a position on a major newspaper or an international food critic as dream jobs.
When she's not busy doing schoolwork, paid work or Lamron work, McMahon said she enjoys traveling and camping, activities undoubtedly influenced by her small-town roots. "I literally live in the middle of the woods - it's really fun," she said, adding that she spent much of her childhood traipsing through the wilderness.
McMahon is passionate about travel, whether it be to Wellesley Island on the St. Lawrence River with her family or Europe. She has traveled to Mexico, Germany, Amsterdam, Italy and Greece already, and hopes to visit Ireland with her parents as a college graduation present. After post-graduation travel, McMahon said she has one more trip to make.
"I definitely want to travel and then move to New York City," she said. "I want to live in the City. That's my dream."