hired

One of my goals coming into my senior year was to secure a full-time position by Thanksgiving. After a really rough September and by the grace of God, I have accomplished this! I am so excited and thankful to have been offered an amazing position at an even more amazing company.

Although I am  excited to have gotten a job offer at all, I am even more thankful because this is finally my chance to leave the marketing realm. Throughout my college years, my career path has shifted and evolved multiple times. For a more general context, I started in fashion, then quickly moved into digital marketing and advertising. I realized that I needed to monetize my major, and marketing seemed like the only decent viable option.

I kept trying to tell myself that I liked marketing, but the deeper I got into it, the more I began to grow distasteful of it. Don't get me wrong- marketing is a beautiful thing that demands a level of creativity and ambition that many other industries do not. However, in the United States, the unwavering trajectory towards money has turned marketing into a rather deceptive field. It is becoming less about building meaningful connections and more about deluding consumers into thinking that a particular product is necessary to be a part of the status quo. I can ramble on about this for hours, but I was beginning to feel like just another limb of the capitalist machine.

My future position is within Product Management, which is something that kind of fell into my lap this summer. Product management is a lot more technical than marketing, and quite frankly, a lot dryer as well. I didn't think that I would like it at first, but I quickly fell in love with the connection that forms between a product and it's owners/managers. For the first time, I felt like I could foster something meaningful out of the work that I was doing. However, because PM isn't something that is regularly offered in entry-level positions, I essentially gave up after the summer and went back into a marketing mentality.

It is undeniable that God was pulling the strings behind my recruiting process. To be quite honest, I was chasing after money. I was teased into consulting and marketing at large financial/tech institutions. I knew that I wouldn't be happy, but I quickly brushed any fearful thoughts aside. When I first applied to this position, I had no idea what it would entail. It was advertised as a UX Design position, which I was in no way qualified for. However, after moving past the first rounds (where I was brtually honest about my lack of design/technical experience), I found out during the Superday that they were actually hiring for two positions - a UX Design analyst, and a Product Management one.

Long story short, I was able to secure a tailor-made position for me. I loved my interviewer, was thoroughly impressed by the company, and was even offered a salary that would allow for me to comfortably pay off my student loans and help my parents out. Quite frankly, I'm still in the middle of processing how this all happened.

The only dark cloud over this matter is that I received a surprising amount of passive backlash from my friends about this. I was excited to share my joy, as I would've expected in return when they all received offers. Unfortunately, it was made very clear that many of them would rather me not even mention to them that I had gotten an offer.

I would be lying if I said that this wasn't breaking my heart. To have an idea of a mutual respect in mind and to have it swept away is frustrating, disappointing, and even shocking. Many of those who are impassive or negative towards me aren't even aware of the circumstances that surround my position. There is a part of me that wants to just lash out and scream about all the ways that I feel, but there is another part of me that quietly accepts this fork in my life.

I don't know how to end this post because these feelings are all still brimming at the edges of myself, threatening to spill over and cascade around me in waves of confusion, hurt, and smugness. I will be back with an update soon, hopefully.

Till then, all thankfulness to the heavens for being so good in my life.