On Air, Online, On Schedule: Gen Z Women Shaping Entertainment from Within | Nadab Rana

Cecily Johnson signed her lease on Halloween. Her start date at NBC Sports was three days later.

She had graduated in December, 2024 and spent the better part of a year applying to jobs every single day. She kept a spreadsheet tracking application dates, stages, and notes on whether she was underqualified or overqualified for each role. She had paid for entertainment job boards. She had interviewed for a position that changed its terms three times before it became hers: full-time with benefits. And on the night she finally received the offer, her mother called to tell her she had been diagnosed with cancer.

“I was like, what should I do?” Cecily says. “I’m about to leave, and you’re about to start treatments.”

She took the job and moved to Fairfield County, Connecticut, miles from her home in Philadelphia. Her mother completed treatment and had her surgery. Cecily and her brother pooled their money and sent chocolate-covered strawberries.

It is that kind of biography—unglamorous, costly, and ultimately triumphant—that defines a new generation of young women entering entertainment, not through family connections or lucky breaks, but through a persistence that borders on obsessiveness. Cecily Johnson, twenty-three, is now a full-time digital programming coordinator at NBC Sports. There is also Madeline (Maddie) Vaja, twenty, a PR coordinator intern for unscripted programming at Peacock, and Emily Ferrante, twenty-five, a lifestyle content creator building her audience post by post. Together, they offer a composite portrait of what it looks like to be Gen Z, ambitious, and working in one of the most coveted industries on earth.

The Numbers Game

The entertainment industry has never been easy to crack; what has changed is the degree of difficulty. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates reached 9.7 percent in September 2025, according to Federal Reserve data, the same rate as for people aged twenty to twenty-four, who never went to college at all. Nearly 43 percent of college grads ages twenty-two to twenty-seven were “underemployed” as of December, 2025, meaning they held jobs that did not require a college degree. In April 2026, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned that the Class of 2026 could experience the highest graduate jobless rate in years, driven in part by AI eliminating entry-level roles. For anyone trying to break into a competitive creative field, the odds tighten further.

Cecily spent nearly two months interviewing for her job at NBC Sports. Her journey to full employment started with a recruiter’s call on a beach during a family vacation, and continued through a full day of in-person interviews. Before the official offer, the position quietly transformed from a six-month freelance contract into a full-time job. “The job changed three, four times along the way.”

“There’s always something out there for you.”

Maddie, an NYU student, applied to her Peacock internship through LinkedIn with no connections in the industry, and estimates her overall callback rate at 5-10percent across her entire job search. “It is really just a numbers game,” she stated. “80 to 90 percent not hearing back, or rejections.” She has held six positions since starting college, several of which she was not passionate about, but she understood early in her journey that experience is the only currency that compounds faster than debt. Graduates who worked during school in 2025 landed jobs at twice the rate of those who did not, according to an April 2026 ZipRecruiter report.

Emily, who has been making content since high school and was bullied openly for her YouTube channel, keeps her own count. She posts under @emilyondemand on TikTok and Instagram, where she makes day-in-the-life videos that pull the camera through her actual week, getting ready for work, moving through her apartment, and sitting through hard days on camera. Brands have taken notice: her partnerships include Dunkin, CoverGirl, Thayers, Goli, Dr. Melaxin, and, most recently, Quince, the home and apparel brand. Her videos are personal enough to feel like a conversation, and relatable enough that strangers consistently tell her they see themselves in them. “When a video does not perform well, it inspires me to make something better.” She says. “Because anytime I am inspired to create something, I know that it is going to reach somebody else.” The creator economy was valued at $191.55 billion in 2025, with over 200 million content creators globally competing for attention. Emily entered it not because the numbers looked favorable, but because she genuinely could not stop.

Passion Was Never the Plan

A persistent myth about Gen Z in the workforce is that they want dream jobs handed to them, fully formed and Instagram-ready. The reality is almost the opposite. All three women ended up in roles they did not originally see coming.

Maddie took a PR class the year before landing at Peacock. She walked out convinced she never wanted to work in PR, and applied for the role anyway. Now she is seriously considering making it her full-time career. Her path there was built incrementally: at sixteen, she started interning at her local theater, running spotlights and managing talent arrivals. She kept going through an influencer’s social media team, a marketing internship at NYU’s Skirball theater, and eventually Peacock, learning hard skills at each stop–even when the stops themselves were not the destination. “I’ve done a couple of jobs that I wasn’t super passionate about, but they gave me a lot of amazing experiences, which helped me get to where I am now.” She pauses. “Where I am, you know, at a dream job.”

Cecily grew up as an arts kid in the Philadelphia suburbs, the kind of person who did every theater activity she could find and actively, deliberately avoided caring about sports. Now she coordinates programming across NBC Sports’ NFL, WNBA, NBA, and international properties. She also follows player contract negotiations and draft picks. And her next personal goal: “My new mission is the MLB for this summer.” She learned football by watching every Eagles game she could get in New York during a stretch of homesickness, then learned everything else on the job. “I had never been able to understand football before. I put in the effort to learn.”

Emily did not set out to build a career from sharing her life. She set out to connect. “Creating content has been a passion of mine since I was in high school,” she confessed, “I didn’t feel I had truly made it until I hit 10,000 followers on TikTok. It felt like a goal I had been dreaming of for ten years.” When she talks about her audience, she talks about recognition; the feeling that someone watching a video of her navigating an ordinary Tuesday is also, quietly, watching themselves. “Even though it feels like nobody will really have an interest in what you are doing at the very start, you have to act and show up like everybody wants to know what you’re doing every single second of the day.”

For all three, the career they ended up in required them to first try something adjacent, or something they actively resisted, before arriving somewhere that fit. The direct route, it turns out, was not available.

Always On

One of the most consistent realities these women share is that there is no off switch. A dream job in entertainment requires constant availability that most job descriptions omit entirely.

A dream job in entertainment requires constant availability that most job descriptions omit entirely.

Cecily sent a detailed email to her operations team at 3 a.m. on a Friday, because a round of NBA playoff graphics needed to be processed before the weekend. She did not want anyone scrambling to reach her on Saturday. “I knew that the people I was sending the email to worked around the clock.” She remarks this with the calm of someone who has recalibrated her baseline. She woke up the next day and did not look at her phone. That, she decided, is the balance. Her boss has told her more than once to zoom out, to remember that she is upstream of everyone waiting on her decisions. She is still learning to trust that.

She also pushes back against the assumption that landing a role at a place like NBC Sports requires a specific educational pedigree. A former colleague came from Dickinson College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. A friend on the email marketing team relocated from Oklahoma. “They are willing to put up with less,” Cecily explained, and she means it as a compliment: people who arrive without a prestigious name behind them tend not to wait for the road to be smoothed out. “There’s always something out there for you. If you’re at a place like NBC Sports, you have so many opportunities. Use that.”

Maddie works sixteen hours a week at Peacock alongside a full-course load, monitoring media coverage for shows on Bravo and Peacock, drafting press materials for journalists, and helping coordinate talent visits to the office. “As a student, time management skills and such have really helped me, especially trying to be a full-time student and be employed part-time.” She adds, a little pointedly, that someone who is not “chronically online” probably should not pursue her field. “You’ve got to be in the moment. You’ve got to know what’s trending. Those silly sounds on TikTok that we all laughed about, those are moments that you need to know how to jump on.”

Emily props her phone up at any given moment, turns whatever she is doing into material, and makes it look effortless. It is not effortless. “Balancing my day job and creating content is definitely a struggle sometimes. Some days I just straight up don’t feel like filming.” She posts anyway, and the honesty of that, the willingness to let people see the days when showing up takes effort, is precisely what makes her audience stay.

Surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 claim that 63 percent of Gen Z workers preferred hybrid work and wanted clear separation between their professional and personal lives. All three of these women would endorse that preference. Though none of them has quite achieved it yet.

The Price of the Dream

There is a financial reality underneath entertainment’s glamour that is rarely part of the pitch. Cecily lives it directly. Fairfield County is one of the most expensive housing markets on the East Coast, and roughly 80 percent of her paycheck goes to rent. “Of course, I didn’t learn that until I was about to come up here,” she recalled with a sardonic laugh. She is the youngest person in her office by about two years, which means she arrived at a position many of her peers are still trying to reach, doing it at a cost that would make most of them flinch. The week she got the offer, her mother called about the diagnosis. She was seventy miles away in Connecticut, through the treatment, the surgery, the recovery, “I wish there were moments where I kind of didn’t have a job.” She pauses. “So I could help.” She does not say this as a reason to walk away from what she built. She notes that she is still learning what independence actually costs.

For Emily, the financial picture is more volatile by design. The creator economy paid TikTok creators over $5 billion in 2025, and the Creator Rewards Program now pays between $0.40 and $1.00 per 1,000 qualified views. But that math only works at scale, and scale takes time. Emily has no manager. She handles everything herself, outreach to brands, back-and-forth with marketing teams, invoicing, contracts, negotiations over rates, all of it; the brand partnerships, TikTok view payments, and TikTok Shop commissions that together make up a monthly income that flexes, but holds. “There is so much that goes on behind the scenes that if you’re not doing it yourself, you don’t know about it.” She is clear-eyed about what engagement instability costs her. “If I’m having a bad month engagement-wise, it definitely shows when I go to pitch myself to brands, and I get more rejections than acceptances.”

The mythology around creator life does not account for any of that. “I think the ‘influencer’ life is very inflated in a sense where people think it’s better than it actually is. A lot of big influencers don’t always show the rejections, the disappointments, the failures.” She does. It is, so she has found, exactly what her audience wants from her.

Maddie’s cost is measured in time. The internship is demanding enough during an academic year that she has had to accept a straightforward trade: experience now, full compensation later. She is not complaining, just calculating.

Who Gets In the Room 

Cecily is direct about what it means to be a Black woman navigating a predominantly white corporate environment.

Her department at NBC Sports is roughly thirty people. When she arrived, she counted three or four people who were not white. That has shifted slightly since. Two recent hires on her team are both Black, but the dynamics she describes are not new, and not subtle.

“I would just kind of be quiet,” she recounts. “I would do my job, but I wouldn’t really speak much unless I was spoken to.” The problem, she explains, is that quietness reads differently depending on who is being quiet. “When you are a person of color, you could have the most pleasant look on your face, and they’ll be like, oh my gosh, she hates me.” She was just new. She was just adjusting. But adjusting, it turns out, is a performance in environments where your presence is already being scrutinized.

She eventually stopped performing comfort for other people’s benefit. “I don’t want to be someone that I’m not just to make them feel more comfortable. And then that makes me feel uncomfortable, pretending that I want to talk to them.” She decided to be herself, wait for the room to catch up, and trust that people would figure out who she was over time. She also noticed that her wearing her hair naturally in the workplace was, apparently, a statement. “I don’t care. I mean, it’s kind of deciding how you want to be perceived.”

What helped most was NBC’s Black Employee Network, a group that meets regularly across teams to share experiences and give each other practical advice. The group talked through what it means to be asked to perform outside your job description simply to be taken seriously within it. Having a room where those conversations could happen, Cecily says, made the rest of the building easier to navigate.

What Gen Z Actually Wants

If there is a thread running through all three of these women, it is not ambition, but clarity.

Emily does not sell the influencer life. “If someone were to come up to me and say, ‘I want your exact life,’ I would tell them to be ready for a lot of disappointment, a lot of doubting yourself, and a lot of negativity directed at you.” And then she would tell them to do it anyway, provided they have what it actually takes: a thick skin, a genuine drive to create, and the consistency to show up even when nothing is working. What she does not mention, not once, is having the right setup or a following they do not yet have. “The only things that you need to succeed in content creation are a passion for creating and consistency.”

Maddie’s version of this is simpler: just put yourself out there. “I’ve applied cold to every single position I’ve ever gotten.” Six positions, and not one of them through a connection. Her advice to anyone on the outside is not to wait until the conditions look right. “I want to affirm that it’s not the only way to get cool jobs,” when talking about networking. “But just apply. You never really know what’s going to happen.”

“Ambitious without complacency,”

Cecily, who signed her lease on Halloween, started work three days later and has since learned to send a 3 a.m. email and still make it to the gym on time. She has settled on a philosophy she borrowed from watching colleagues who arrived without obvious advantages and made something of it anyway. “Ambitious without complacency,” she declares.

According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Gen Z survey, only 6 percent of Gen Z cited reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal. Most said learning, growth, and balance mattered more. These three women are the most honest embodiment of those goals. They wanted something specific, went and got it, and are still working out what it costs, in real time, without pretending otherwise.

Cecily Johnson is a full-time digital programming coordinator at NBC Sports/NBCUniversal. Maddie Vaja is a PR coordinator intern for unscripted programming at Peacock/NBCUniversal. Emily Ferrante is a lifestyle content creator. Follow her at @emilyondemand on TikTok and Instagram.

Feature Image (from left to right): Maddie Vaja, Cecily Johnson, and Emily Ferrente / Photo Credit: Maddie Vaja, Cecily Johnson, and Emily Ferrente / Edited by Nadab Rana