When I graduated college a year and a half ago, I assumed my career would begin in a fairly traditional way. A full-time role, a clear path forward, and the feeling that everything I had been working toward would start to make sense and come to fruition. Like a lot of recent graduates, I believed that once I crossed the stage, the uncertainty would start to fade and the life I had been planning for would finally begin. Instead, my journey has been anything but traditional.
The reality is that marketing can be an incredibly difficult field to break into when you’re freshly post-grad. It has become an increasingly over-saturated industry and trying to secure an entry-level job is nearly impossible without a plethora of experience and a whole network of industry connections. Even then, a position right out of college is not a guarantee. The constant rejection, and more often than anything, the constant silence chips away at your self-worth and makes you question whether you made the right choice when you chose your future career as a bright-eyed and hopeful 18-year-old. It is difficult not to internalize that silence, especially when you are watching peers announce new roles and career milestones while your own inbox remains empty. There’s this strange dissonance that comes with spending years preparing for a career only to realize that readiness and opportunity do not always arrive at the same time.
I’ve noticed that there also seems to be a stigma associated with the inability to secure your dream job immediately after graduation. I have experienced first-hand the embarrassment that comes with the dreaded question “What are you doing now?” But really, no one talks about how normal it is to find yourself stuck in the “in-between” of your education and your early career. It’s easy to look around and notice everyone else’s successes and feel like you’re way behind, but in reality, everyone is on their own unique journey and there is absolutely no timeline for success. It’s what you do while you’re in this “in-between” that matters. The in-between is often treated like a waiting room, as though real progress only begins once you reach the “right” title or milestone. But I have come to believe that some of the most formative growth happens in the seasons where nothing looks polished or certain yet.
I decided to spend my time in the in-between discovering ways that I can be the very best version of myself both professionally and personally. I started my graduate program at the University of Akron immediately after finishing undergrad, and this December I will graduate with my Masters in Strategic Communication and a graduate certificate in Strategic Social Media. Being a student is something that has always fulfilled me, and this program has given me a sense of purpose. It has been a way for me to take my education a step further and apply my skills on the graduate level. More than that, it has reminded me that learning has always been one of the ways I build confidence in myself. In a season where so much has felt uncertain, continuing my education gave me something steady to invest in. I am truly so thankful for this program and the professors who have pushed me to succeed.
This time also led me to starting my own freelance marketing business in July, and ten months in I’ve had the opportunity to work with five small businesses which has truly taught me more than I ever could have anticipated. This started as a practical decision to build tangible experience for my resume, but it has turned into something much more formative than that. Being a small business owner in my early twenties and working with real clients has given me an unexpected education in strategy, business, and creativity, while also allowing me to advance my already-established skills. None of the clients that I work with are alike in nature, so I’ve been able to learn how to be creative and find content opportunities across different industries. Being a business owner has also pushed me to put myself out there and meet new people, which is something I have always admittedly struggled with. It has forced me to become more confident in my ideas, more comfortable advocating for my work, and more willing to trust that I do, in fact, belong in the rooms I once felt intimidated by.
But as with anything, there are hard parts associated with this season of life. Creative burnout is real and it’s so easy to become disconnected from your own voice while creating for others. Somewhere between creating content for clients, studying communication academically, and trying to keep up with the pace of an industry built on constant output, I realized I had stopped creating anything that felt like mine. When your creativity becomes tied to deadlines, deliverables, and performance metrics, it can be surprisingly easy to lose touch with the part of it that once felt instinctive and personal. I was spending all of my energy producing ideas, but none of them felt like they belonged to me anymore. The question became: how do I get my voice back?
What a lot of you might not know about me is that a big part of my passion lies with writing. My undergraduate degree is in Emerging Media, but I chose journalism as my degree focus because writing has always been where I have found my voice. It was the first place I learned how to make sense of what I was thinking and feeling, and for a long time, it was the clearest extension of who I was creatively. Over the last year and a half, I’ve lost writing as a personal outlet and I struggled with knowing how to incorporate it back into my life. But one day, it just hit me.
I’ve always been someone who finds inspiration in weird places, so it’s really no shock to me that a movie was the driving force I needed to seek out the opportunity to write again. I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 with my mom, and as unexpected as it may sound, I left the theater feeling reconnected to a part of myself I had not made space for in a long time. It reminded me that writing was never just an academic skill or career interest for me. It was always how I processed the world. Throughout the film, Anne Hathaway’s character makes a lot of strong statements about the importance of journalism and written content, even when it seems as though it’s a dying art. As a writer at heart, I felt so empowered. Long-form writing is not dead!
This led me to create this blog, which is named The In-Between Edit as an homage to being in this “in-between” stage of my life. This space will allow me to explore marketing and media insights, reflections on my creative work, navigating the experiences of my early twenties and early career, and overall industry commentary developed through personal experience. Getting to combine my passions for marketing and long-form writing into one space brings me the certain sense of fulfillment that I have been lacking, and I hope that you find something that speaks to you along the way. More than anything, this blog is an attempt to document the process while I am still in it, rather than waiting until I have a perfectly packaged perspective to share. If nothing else, this space will serve as proof that growth rarely happens after everything is figured out. More often, it happens while you are still in the middle of becoming.
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