Your Career is Ready for You!

Going into college freshman year, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my career: Digital Marketing. I joined the Kelley Living Learning Center (a community for the business students at Indiana University) because I wanted to be surrounded with other motivated business students. However, I didn’t know freshman year that along my college journey, I would gain new interests and my path would change. In the future, I may want a digital marketing job. However, now, with a passion for retail, I’m an incoming Assistant Buyer at Burlington. This job will allow me to be analytical and creative, which fulfills my dream.

So, how did I launch my career?

Freshman Year

The best thing about the Kelley School of Business is how they help you develop your brand. They also give you the tools to get you a job from the beginning. Compass, a required class for three years, taught us how to develop a personal brand that’s authentic, distinctive, and can be proven with stories. Additionally, we learned how to make a positive impact online and the importance of social media. Many businesses utilize social media in their recruitment process and to analyze job applicants’ internet presence. Also, we learned how to tell stories and why they are crucial in the interviewing process. An approach to establish your brand with a prospective employer is by sharing STAR stories.

STAR:

• Situation: Introduce the circumstance to establish the story’s setting.
• Task: Describe the work you had to do, along with any difficulties you encountered.
• Action: Justify what you did and how.
• Result: Describe the results your activities produced.

In addition to the STAR format, I practiced my answers to the common interview questions such as:

• “Tell me about yourself/Walk me through your resume”
• “Why do you want to work for this company/Why do you want this job?”
• “What are your greatest strengths/weaknesses?”
• “Why should we hire you?”

Equally important to these questions was networking, which means building relationships. By creating a LinkedIn profile, which I HIGHLY recommend creating during freshman year (or ASAP, if you don’t already have one), networking will be easier. If you’re interested, I can write tips specifically for LinkedIn in the future. But for now, focus on your actions and results in everything you do, no matter how small.

Doing all of these things made me focused and realize the steps that I needed to take to accomplish my goals. Throughout freshman year, I joined plenty of clubs to get some leadership experience along with volunteering, because giving back to the community has always been important to me. At the end of the year, networking helped me to gain a small internship at my aunt’s personal branding company to work on digital marketing techniques. In addition, I saw an ad on Instagram to be a VS PINK Campus Rep and I knew I needed to apply. In order to give myself a little advantage, I also got a job for the summer as a VS PINK Sales Associate, cementing my passion for retail. This would give me more knowledge of the brand.

Sophomore Year

Yay! I was so excited to be chosen to be a VS PINK Campus Rep and led a team on campus (with a co-rep). Not only was the role so much fun, but I also gained great experiences for my resume. By this time, I had obviously started taking new classes and gained new insights. For starters, I began to realize I enjoyed my analytical classes more than I originally thought because they were like puzzles for me to solve.

Networking helped me get a Business Analytics Internship for the summer at a digital marketing company in NYC. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, through this virtual internship, I gained many valuable skills. For example, I was tasked with learning Power BI, which is a newer tool that is incredibly useful if you are interested in analytics.

Using Excel and Power BI, I produced findings for three projects at that time: a weekly dashboard of the survey results on trending issues connected to COVID, a demographic profile of converters for digital ads for two of their clients, and a framework for an automated/simplified client targeting and profiling.

Collaborating with a data scientist, data engineer and me as the business analyst, we created this useful framework for consumer targeting. As a culminating project, I led a company-wide presentation of the finished product with the CEO of Fluent. Having this analytical experience, in addition to my creative abilities, really helped me stand out in my interviews.

Junior Year

During my junior year, my passion for retail really blossomed. In addition to taking retail classes, I joined the selective and coveted Kelley Retail Workshop. This is a professional program designed to develop a comprehensive knowledge of the retail industry from a corporate perspective through interaction with industry leaders. I also joined the National Retail Foundation. Both of these organizations really expanded my retail network and career potential.

When it came time to apply and interview for a summer internship, I knew I wanted something in the retail industry. Through Handshake (an online recruiting platform for students and alumni), the Kelley Career Fair was held virtually, opening the door for opportunities to engage with even more companies that couldn’t meet in person. I gratefully was offered a Merchandising Internship at Bath & Body Works. This internship was so much fun. Working on a four-season merchandising plan on the Car Fragrance and Room Spray team was so worthwhile. It not only taught me about the merchant role, but how connected the different roles in the retail industry are from concept to market.

Senior Year

This year was tough. I was taking hard classes and applying to jobs like crazy. I applied to a wide array of jobs because at this point, I had many different interests. Again, the thing that helped me the most was using my network and the Kelley Career Fair on Handshake. Randomly applying to jobs never worked for me; the candidate pool was huge and made it harder to stand out. I ended up getting two offers that were very different, which made the decision very difficult.

Since I went far away from school, I ultimately wanted to start my career closer to home. Although I’m not closing the door on a marketing career in the future, I decided to take the offer as an Assistant Buyer at Burlington, allowing me to work a hybrid schedule in NJ and commute to NYC (my dream). While saving money, I could still gain some independence when my family is in Tampa. I also thought that if I wanted to try to work in the retail industry, this would be my chance. I may go back to get my MBA down the road. For now, I’m excited to start my first real adult job and to see what my future holds.

My Ultimate Advice for Launching Your Career

Start exploring your different passions and trying new things. The companies that I talked to loved well-rounded candidates that were creative and analytical. Being both gave me a lot to highlight in interviews. Also, think about where you want to end up, and take every step to get there. You may be surprised by the direction this leads you in, but that’s okay. Just be sure you’re still passionate about what you’re doing. In interviews, passion was the one thing I could always count on no matter how nervous I was.

If you want to see more details about my career or keep up with me, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my Contact page! I would love to chat and expand my network 😉 Comment below about your career journey or what you would like me to write about next!