"Just another student" Cunningham is not. Her stint on Cycle 8 of Tyra Banks's brainchild, the frequently abbreviated ANTM, has landed her far outside the realm of "regular" and catapulted her into a world of live TV interviews, portfolio-building photo-shoots and constant traveling.
Not surprisingly Cunningham, who has returned to campus after taking off Fall term to tape the show, is a busy girl, and she's hard to track down. But as soon as we get in touch and she spouts your average airline horror story - her bags were lost on a return flight from LA and she's been operating for the last few days without make up or wardrobe (not so easy for a girl very much in the public eye) - it becomes clear just how down to earth she is.
How does she manage to juggle senior spring and a burgeoning entertainment career? "I feel like I have separate selves," she claims, explaining that the "Whitney" you see on the show and the "Whitney" sitting in her room writing a paper are two different people.
Fortunately for Cunningham, the Whitney cast on America's Next Top Model seems pretty true to form. Unlike her Ivy League counterpart on the show, a Brown graduate who made it to the final episode in Cycle 2, Whitney rarely found herself portrayed as "the snob." Instead her obvious intelligence was regularly touted by judges as one of her best assets. "Not to sound boastful, but I was constantly complimented on my intelligence, told that I could do so many things, that the sky's the limit," Cunningham said.
"Tyra saw me in a very positive light - she was a fan of me. I never really got constructive criticism," Cunningham said, obviously flattered by the favorable opinion of a woman she describes as "really, really classy."
Cunningham's daily schedule during the two and a half months of taping in LA wasn't all chatting with Banks and posing for celebrity photographers, however. "I didn't want to fight with the other girls over phone time, so I'd wake up at 5 a.m. every morning to call my boyfriend before he went to class and my Mom before she went to work. I'd take a shower and have a cup of coffee so I'd be alert. I also read a lot, more than I ever have been able to," Cunningham said.
As for living in a house with 13 other girls? It didn't really phase her. "A lot of the girls weren't in school, so I think it was a lot easier for me. I was adjusted. There wasn't any fussing and bickering."
And the cameras? "They definitely took some getting used to," Cunningham said. "In the beginning we'd play games with the cameramen, but after a while I forgot they were there."
Though living in the house may have been easy, the season wasn't without its challenges. "People forget that 'Top Model' is a reality show before it is a modeling competition," Cunningham said, explaining why she wasn't able to perform as well as she had wanted to in front of the cameras. "I think people expected me, in the photo shoots, to be this over-the-top, funny, charming personality all the time. I had a hard time finding a balance between taking a good picture and performing for the cameras."
In the end it was Cunningham's inability to take a good picture that led to her dismissal in an episode which aired last week, but her attitude remains remarkably optimistic. Encouraged by the better quality of the portfolio she began to build in New York City prior to ANTM, she plans to return to the city and continue to pursue a career in modeling and entertainment.
In her budding entertainment career, Cunningham is enthusiastic that while the effects of the show were some of her primary concerns going into the taping, she thinks that the way she was portrayed and "quite honestly, [her] Ivy League education," will prevent the reality-TV stigma from affecting her legitimacy. Her aim to educate and change has already begun to become a reality. "I've been getting e-mail after e-mail after e-mail from little girls, boys, mothers, fathers - from kids who never thought about going to college [before the show]. It's been an inspiration."
"It could happen that a plus-sized model could win ANTM, but a lot of things need to change," Cunningham said.
For now, it seems, the ever-articulate Cunningham is well on her way to affecting some of those changes, remaining very much the Dartmouth student in the process.
