As a senior editor at “Vanity Fair,” Hillary Busis ’06 is used to guiding writers along the winding path from underdeveloped first draft to published article. What others might read as a failed piece of work, Busis sees as an opportunity—an outlook that she extends to her own proverbial bumps in the road.

“Looking back, I found that some of my most valuable experiences have come as a direct result of failure, or at least what I perceived to be a failure in the moment,” Busis shared with the 2014 Shady Side Academy Cum Laude Society inductees during a keynote address. In her speech, Busis focused on the many struggles she endured at Shady Side and beyond, highlighting how being given the space to try and fail ultimately set her up for academic and personal growth.

She recalls that at the end of her junior year, the choir instructor told her she would need to perform with the concert choir her senior year after having spent two years performing with the higher-level chamber choir. The move stung, but it opened her schedule to add an elective course that would have been a conflict with chamber choir. That class changed everything. “The single most transformative academic experience that I had in my life was taking Dr. Suzik’s Gender Studies course my senior year,” Busis says.

“He didn’t just encourage me to see the world in a different way. He also encouraged me to put those observations in writing, first as assignments for his class, and then as opinion pieces submitted to the ‘Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’,” Busis says. The newspaper accepted Busis’ work. “Seeing your name in print is very satisfying.”

Shady Side offered plenty of opportunities for Busis to continue to put pen to paper and hone what would become her career-long craft. She earned a coveted spot as a Scribe, allowing her to help other students edit their essays; she was an editor of Shady Side’s literary magazine “The Egerian;” and she wrote and edited articles for “The Shady Side News.”
 

I'm pretty intrinsically motivated, but going to a school like Shady Side encouraged me to keep pushing myself time and time again.

“I remember writing a column in December of my senior year asking, ‘Why is everybody so worried about getting into college?’” she says. “Then I was promptly rejected from my early decision school.” Busis calls attention to the moment because it signifies the importance of recognizing that your success doesn’t hinge on the accomplishments you believe you will or should have. Following her first-choice rejection, Busis attended Columbia University, where she ultimately rose to a managing editor position at the university’s newspaper and fell deeper in love with writing, editing, and storytelling.

Before going to “Vanity Fair,” Busis wrote TV recaps for the “Wall Street Journal,” interned and later worked at “Entertainment Weekly,” and was an entertainment editor for the website “Mashable.” Her professional journey required grit and perseverance, which Shady Side prepared her for. “I’m pretty intrinsically motivated, but going to a school like Shady Side encouraged me to keep pushing myself time and time again,” she says. 
 Busis shares that even her academic work at Shady Side offered a bit of foreshadowing for pursuits to come. As a junior, Busis’ award-winning U.S. History research paper tackled movie censorship in the mid-twentieth century, highlighting her attraction to cinema. Now, when she’s not at the Sundance Film Festival or Vanity Fair’s Oscars party, Busis is behind a computer screen scrutinizing words, searching for kernels of greatness. “As an editor, you often have to tear something down to build it back up,” she says. 

Filled with the courage to try in spite of or even because of the failures it may bring, Busis remains excited for what’s to come. “I am who I am and where I am largely because of the ways I failed in the past,” she said at the end of her keynote address. “I look forward to seeing where failure takes me in the future.”