Maughan Library shoot: Meet KCL student blogger Emma Bates

She has over 30,000 followers across her blog, Instagram and Twitter, she gets free clothes and trips around the world – and she’s still doing her degree.

This is Emma Bates, KCL War Studies student turned lifestyle blogger extraordinaire.

So we did a photo shoot with Emma at the Maughan Library, showing London in true light: autumn weather and beautiful architecture and chatted to her about her successful blog over the newly-released Starbucks Christmas menu.

Emma Bates puts all of our lives to shame. While we’re struggling to finish our essays and assignments, she’s doing all of that, as well as running a successful lifestyle blog, My London Lifestyle.

“It started as a way to just keep my parents up to date with what I was doing.

“I never started it to get really recognized. Then people began commenting and sharing my posts and it really took off.”

She advises other aspiring writers and photographers to just start blogging.

“I taught myself how to do it all online. It just develops as you develop. You can’t expect it to be something incredible when you first start.”

The coolest thing to come out of her blog, Emma says, was her recent press trip to Malaysia, which was sponsored by Malaysian Airlines and several Malaysian hotels.

Brands of all types, from clothing to restaurants, want a piece of her now.  As her blog has grown, Emma is flooded with emails and requests, which can definitely be hard to manage alongside her university work.

“I really enjoy blogging so I allocate myself half an hour to blog, but now the emails are just ridiculous.

“Emails could easily take me three hours a day if I actually sat down and read them.”

“A lot of my friendship group are very talented at what they do, and they don’t go to uni or they’ve dropped out so sometimes it’s hard to stay with it.”

However, as a third year student it won’t be much longer until Emma is free of lectures and coursework.

If possible, she would love to be able to make her blog into a career. Otherwise, she hopes to work at Refinery29 or at a magazine and move to Berlin or New York.

In any case, she will be carrying on her blog and we will continue to be jealous of her glamorous life of jet-setting, fashion, and fabulous food.

But if you think this lifestyle is for you, do as Emma suggested and start your own blog.

It might start off just being for you and it might take you a long time to get followers in the thousands, but as Emma has proven, anything is possible.

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Photographer: Daisy Powles

Interviewers and photoshoot organisers: Anna Hall & Amira Arasteh 

Model, blogger and interviewee: Emma Bates