I started off with an internship at a company. Luckily, I knew somebody who worked there. This company did not tell anyone that they had open internships. They prefer people that they knew, and so I was extremely lucky. After that internship, I was able to turn that into a full-time position. It was a really bad time in the economy during the recession, and so at the time, there weren't a lot of jobs available. I applied to over 30 jobs after I graduated from college, and I only was offered an interview for this one where I had been an intern for four years. I consider that a really important part of my life. I work in marketing operations where I focus on making sure that data gets to the right place and that our systems are all connected together. I had an opportunity to do that because of my internship. At the time, they just hired a lot of interns to see what they were good at, and they assigned me to marketing operations. So it's not something that I chose to do, but once I was introduced to it, I fell in love with it.

The responsibilities have to do a lot around making sure that the areas that we gather data for marketing and sales teams for customer success, for support all of these areas, that they are standardized and that they go to the right place and that there ingestible So a sales person needs very straightforward answers and to be able to sort very quickly, so that way they can do their job. It's my job to figure out how to make sure they can do things like that. In the marketing operations role it depends on the type of company that you work for. If you work for an established company with a very good work-life balance 40 hours a week is normal. I work for a startup, and I primarily have worked for startups. So it's much closer to 70 hours a week, which is not unusual for most jobs in a startup. Anyway, I do travel once a month, or I did before COVID. I would travel to visit my company, either at their San Francisco headquarters or overseas, to see other people, to help them, to get their data in line, or to meet with other people in marketing most of the time in a marketing operation role. You will travel less than that though, and primarily I found marketing operations travels to give training to people.

Especially if you want to go into something like marketing operations it's wonderful for people who are good at problem-solving and troubleshooting. The challenges are often that the situation you find yourself in is one-off situations, you often don't see the same errors multiple times. So you have to really teach yourself how do I work through the solution that I'm trying to find? Documentation is a really big thing, especially at larger companies, to make sure that everyone understands how things work. The biggest and best approach, in my experience with dealing with challenges is being very transparent and taking ownership. I'll give you a good example everybody makes mistakes. The biggest thing I learned is an intern is that you own your mistake right away. At one point, another intern erased every first name from our entire database. Over 130 contacts suddenly lost their first name. It was a Friday afternoon and he just left and didn't tell anybody. It was not a very good thing for him. He stayed, but no one ever looked at him the same way. A few years later, I was still an intern and I deleted every name in our database so 150,000 names were just gone. I called support on one phone and on my cell phone. I called my boss and I told them what happened, and they were able to bring everything back. If I had just gone home, we might have lost data. So if you just tell people I made this mistake and here's what I'll do to make sure it never happens in the future, people have a lot more respect for you.