After Max Magid (C’19) had been involved with GU Politics for a few years, he decided to start a new student-run publication focused on promoting a better understanding of politics and encouraging respectful dialogue. Along with a group of students, Max spent his senior year building On The Record, GU Politics’ flagship student-run online publication, creating a website and recruiting students to write for it.
“My biggest goal and hope was that it would outlive my time at Georgetown,” Max said. “I felt like, there’s all these students with all of these ideas and opinions, and a lot of ambitious people who wanted something published. I thought [to] match that supply of people who wanted that with just an expanded function of GU Politics.”
Max worked with other students, including his now-wife Katie Rogers (B’19), to create On The Record partly as a way to get students involved with GU Politics who wouldn’t have otherwise attended events or discussion groups, but may want to connect through writing. They were influenced and inspired by the Fly On The Wall Podcast (now The Fly), another student-run GU Politics initiative, which had been founded the year before.
Max was a freshman when GU Politics launched in 2015, and he was an active participant throughout his time at Georgetown. He was on the Student Advisory Board for two years, helped to plan and set up before events, and engaged regularly with GU Politics Fellows through discussion groups and office hours. He says GU Politics shaped his Georgetown experience and was how he spent most of his time on campus.
“As far as career, [GU Politics] really gave me an interesting insight into how decisions are actually made, all the pieces that go into it,” Max said.
The experience he got with GU Politics, he said, partly influenced his decision to study applied urban science and informatics at New York University after working on campaigns for a few years following graduation.
When he graduated from Georgetown in 2019, Max joined Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign as an organizer, and later Michael Bloomberg’s campaign doing data analysis. He then did a stint at Fair Count working on the 2020 census before deciding “I was tired of getting a new job every three months.” He went to NYU and since then has been an operations engineer at Palantir Technologies.
Max said he learned valuable lessons about building relationships and creating unique career paths in politics from the people he connected with through GU Politics. He was able to discuss campaign work with Anatole Jenkins before getting the job on Kamala Harris’ campaign, and he learned about the world of lobbying and bureaucracy from Scott Mulhauser (L’05).
“What GU Politics offers is really unique,” he said. “A lot of colleges have Poli Sci or government courses, and you can learn theoretically how it works, but … what’s actually happening in Washington is really hard to get.”
Max and Katie are still close with friends they shared GU Politics with, and Max stressed taking advantage of opportunities for connections.
“Meet people, other people interested in GU Politics, because they will be your coworkers, people you’re reaching out to for coffee interviews in the future. Don’t be a jerk. People remember it.”