Aliya Chaudhry Interview (Freelance Writer)
Aliya Chaudhry is a freelance writer for a variety of outlets (Billboard, Kerrang!, and Vice among them). Recently, she explored the role of TikTok in the resurgence of pop punk for Consequence.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I’ve wanted to be a writer for pretty much as long as I remember. I wanted to write fiction (and I do write fiction!) but people kept telling me that wasn’t a real job (rude) but then I found out about this job where you could supposedly get money for writing called journalism and when I was about 13 I decided that’s what I would do. And then, a couple of years later, I just became completely obsessed with alternative music and read a bunch of Kerrang!, Alternative Press and Rock Sound and I would joke about being a music journalist, but I wasn’t sure about it yet.
In college, I was pretty much writing throughout—first I wrote for the student newspaper at Bryn Mawr College, and I was the arts section editor my sophomore year, and then I transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and was a technology beat reporter and then a music reporter for the student magazine. (It also turned out to be really useful being in the Philly era during that era of pop-punk, haha!) I also studied abroad one summer at the University of Cambridge, and I took a class on arts and theater journalism with Daniel Rosenthal which turned out to be the best preparation for culture journalism I ever got in an academic setting.