In The Spring Of My Career
By Carina Pierre-LouisHello, everyone! My name is Carina Pierre-Louis, and I am very excited to relaunch the Center for Communication blog. As a new Cooper-Leibner fellow at CenCom, I want to create a space for students, recent grads, and young professionals to connect, share, laugh, and learn together. To get things started, I’d like to share a bit about my journey navigating the job market and all the stress it can be.
First, a bit more about me: I am a recent graduate of Brooklyn College, where I studied Communications and minored in Global Studies. I am an Afro-Latina from Brooklyn and love to rep my city. My hobbies include roller skating, writing poetry, and listening to music. A perfect day for me would be a beautiful summer day, with a gentle breeze, in Prospect Park soundtracked by my friends and a portable speaker. Just like the new season, I am in the springtime of my career in digital marketing and hope to one day become a content creator. But for now, I am just like many of you, navigating the murky waters that are the job market right now. Although it can be scary and a little intimidating, the beginning of your career can also be beautiful and life-changing, and I’d like to shed light on how I got my start in the industry.
From a young age, I was always impatiently curious. I wanted to grow up and live out my dreams of living in a penthouse in Manhattan with just my cat and me. But when it came to what I would do after graduating to get to my penthouse view, I was not sure. So I took on my elder's advice and always kept myself busy with extracurriculars and internships, trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do for a living. It was May 2022, and I committed to applying to every single social media, marketing, or content creation job that Indeed had to offer. Yet for the first time in my life, I was not getting callbacks. Naively, I had come into the industry under the impression that I would always get an interview. Boy, was I wrong. For the summer of 2022, I spent it all applying to everything under the sun and being instantly rejected or ghosted.
The few jobs that would push me to rounds of interviews were in industries I was no longer interested in, like fast food service jobs and childcare gigs. But I passed that stage of my life. Heck, I had a bachelor's degree, and finding a job was still difficult. And so I internalized this rejection and disappointment. I put a lot of pressure on myself that summer to find a job, and it made me depressed and anxious about my future. The degree that I worked so hard to obtain couldn’t even get me a first-round interview, much less a dream penthouse. My Summer 2022 plans went from being booked and busy to sulking in my bed and rage-applying to jobs on Indeed.
Carina (right
) and COOP Cohort C233
One afternoon I noticed an opportunity for a Digital Marketing Apprentice at COOP Careers, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help recent grads overcome underemployment through digital skills and peer connections. The apprenticeship would help recent graduates gain skills for different marketing industries. The opportunity looked amazing, with resume building, professional networking, and a capstone project that allowed us to use our marketing skills on an actual NYC small business. Part of me was apprehensive before applying to the program because it was unpaid and required daily 6-9 PM Zoom sessions over the course of five months. But I understood that COOP would be an investment in myself. I knew that if I was accepted, I would become a more desirable candidate in the future. And so I applied myself, and sure enough, it paid off.
Within two months of starting the program, I secured an internship with The Center for Communication and gained over 500 connections on Linkedin. I realize now that if I hadn’t taken that opportunity to step back and work on myself (literally), I wouldn't have been able to boss up! COOP helped me grow confidence in my skills and myself. I began attending networking events, setting up coffee chats, and taking up space—things I couldn't have imagined doing just a couple of months prior. Not long after starting this blog post, I was able to interview for an internship that ended up offering me a full-time job!
I share my story in hopes that it will encourage you to take risks and try new things. Reconnect with your network—you might not think you even have one, but you do! Your career is a journey, and we all need help from our communities every step of the way. If you’re unsure of where to begin, I encourage you all to sign up for the CenCom newsletter, join the CenCom Networking Group on LinkedIn, and start growing your community today.
While this will be my first and only post as a Cooper-Leibner fellow, I hope to keep on contributing as an alum and share my stories navigating the digital marketing industry. Please connect with me on LinkedIn—and if you’re interested in sharing stories from your own career journeys on the CenCom blog and social media channels, don’t hesitate to email us at community@centerforcommunication.org.
