When Something Clicks, And Then Grows

In high school, I was just hanging out with my friends, playing sports, and being present in school. But every now and then, I would find myself messing around with a website builder or playing with a brand page online, nothing serious, just something that was fun to tinker with. I liked being able to create something and use my creativity on different platforms. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Knowing you enjoy something and knowing what to do with it as a career are two very different things. When it came time to pick a direction, I didn’t follow that creative pull, I followed something that felt closer and more certain. My older sister owned a salon. I liked doing hair and makeup. I figured I already enjoy it, she’s right there, this could work. So I got my cosmetology license and stepped in.

For about two years, I built a life behind a chair. And it was fine, genuinely fine,  for a while. But somewhere between appointments and events and trying to grow my own client base, I kept running into the same problem – I was more interested in marketing and networking than in doing the actual work of the business. I was thinking about the brand, what we could do better on the website, and how to use socials to build clientele. That tension, quiet at first, eventually got loud enough that I couldn’t ignore it.

After about two years, I sat with myself and thought, this wasn’t for me. It wasn’t the people, I loved the people. The creativity, that part was real. But the chair, the scissors, the daily rhythm of it. It wasn’t mine. And I had no idea what came next.

THE PERSONALITY TEST

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes after you leave something you were supposed to love. It’s not dramatic or a big deal, it’s just quiet and confusing. I was in that space when I talked to my dad about it. He suggested I take a personality test. One of those detailed ones that maps your tendencies, your strengths, the kinds of work environments where you actually thrive.

Every single result pointed to creative fields. Design. Communication. Marketing. 

I stared at those results for a long time. Not because they were surprising, they weren’t. They only surprised me because they confirmed something I had already suspected about myself, but hadn’t given myself permission to pursue because I wasn't willing to go back to school. I had always had a little niche for digital marketing and design, even if I’d never called it that. The test didn’t tell me anything new. It just made it more clear in words for me to see. Almost like God was trying to write it out for me because I was resisting everything I genuinely enjoyed, like digital marketing and creating, as well as long lived passion for animals and pursuing a career in vet med. I didn't feel capable of doing those things, which is why hair was the direction I chose. 

So I did what felt slightly terrifying but weirdly logical. I Googled creative agencies in my area. Whiteboard came up first. I found an email address, a founder, and I wrote to them. I told them my background. I told them I had no formal marketing experience. I told them I was genuinely interested and wanted to know if there was any chance I could shadow someone,  intern, or just learn from being in the room. I sent the email without another thought.

They wrote back.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED SO FAR

Starting an internship with no industry background is a different kind of humbling. Everyone around you seems to already speak a language you’re still learning. The tools, the terminology, the way projects move, all of it is new. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel behind, at least at first.

But what I didn’t expect was how quickly the pieces would start connecting. Marketing is not one thing,  it’s a whole system. Email marketing. Organic social. Paid ads. Analytics. Design. Copy. Strategy. Each one is its own. The best marketers understand how they all talk to each other. I’ve worked on small things for big projects, written newsletter content, and explored platforms I had never touched before. Every week, I learn something that reframes how I think about the week before.

One thing that has stuck with me is something our marketing director said: start with email nurture. I assume because it teaches you to think about relationships with clients over time, and it's an easy gateway in. Where is this person in their journey with this brand? What do they need to hear next? Katina has been a big part of helping me understand that, showing me how to look at what’s working, what isn’t, and why. 

But a moment that genuinely changed something for me and made me think was listening to the founders tell their story. Where they started. What they didn’t know. How they built something significant not by having all the answers, but by continuing to do the work. I sat there thinking, everyone starts somewhere. These people who now run a respected agency, working with real clients on real campaigns — they didn’t start knowing how to do it. They started doing it, and the knowledge came.

That sounds simple. But for someone who came in carrying the weight of “I have no experience,” it meant a lot.

THE JOB MARKET...

Here’s what I’ve noticed watching my peers,  a lot of them are stuck. They graduated, some with marketing degrees, some with communications degrees, and some with engineering degrees, but they are struggling to find work in their fields. Not because they lack talent or haven't learned anything. Mostly because the job market they were told was waiting for them requires the qualifications of someone with lots of experience.

Marketing has become a saturated field. Everyone realized it was the future, so everyone studied it. And now there are more graduates than there are open positions, especially at the entry level. The jobs that do exist often ask for two to three years of experience for roles labeled “entry-level”.

The degree alone doesn’t open the door anymore. What opens the door is proof of a portfolio, a client, a project, a result. And the worst part is that most people need the job to build a portfolio, and the portfolio to get the job. 

That is, in some ways, exactly what I did when I sent that cold email to Whiteboard. I didn’t have what the job posting asked for. I showed up anyway and asked to learn.

WHERE I'M SUPPOSED TO BE

Marketing, at its core, is about understanding people well enough to reach them and give attention to how something looks and what it communicates. I have been doing that in some form my whole life. In a salon, every client sitting in your chair is a brief relationship you have to build quickly, earn trust in, and deliver for. That’s not so different from what good marketing does.

What keeps me going is the vision of what this work can actually do for someone. A business finds its voice. The right people discover it. Something clicks, and then grows, and you were part of that. I want to be the person who helps make that happen. I want to see the look on someone’s face when the work pays off. It’s why the learning curve doesn’t scare me. It’s why I’m glad I’m taking the long way here.