My Career Journey and Pathway in Marketing

I’m a senior at Baruch College now majoring in marketing management with a double minor in journalism and New York City studies, but getting here wasn’t always a straight path. I didn’t grow up with a clear map of what higher education or a future career should look like. When I was little, I actually wanted to be a storm chaser. I’ve always dreamed big, sometimes unrealistically big, and I think that ambition has stayed with me, even as my dreams shifted.

I was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Brooklyn by immigrant parents from China who didn’t speak English (or Spanish for that matter). At home, my first language was Chinese, which meant I started school in the ESL program. But I also grew up in a culture where survival and progress depended on self-motivation. That push, that internal drive, got me out of ESL, into the gifted and talented track, and eventually into Brooklyn Technical High School which is a specialized school you enter through the SHSAT.

New York public schools force you to grow up fast. Competition is normal and pressure is expected. In that environment, I found myself gravitating toward roles where I could create, organize, and lead. In high school I joined several volunteering service clubs where I held communication roles on the executive board. My responsibilities included writing emails, designing meeting presentations, and running social media. Our club had over 500 members, so everything I produced actually mattered. It was the first time I felt the responsibility of shaping how a community receives and understands information.

Then COVID hit during my junior year, the most crucial year of high school. The world stopped, but I continued to be ambitious and curious. I started a student-run publication, a space where people could express themselves through writing and design. I led the writing team, and we talked about everything from pop culture to current events.

I loved it and for a while, I thought I wanted to major in journalism. But eventually, I realized something important: writing, for me, works best as my creative escape, not my profession.

So I turned my focus to marketing. It felt like the intersection of everything I enjoyed in communication, strategy, creativity, impact. I applied to Babson, Macaulay Honors at Baruch, and the American School of Business in London. I got into all three, but when I weighed cost, opportunity, and long-term growth, Baruch made the most sense. The Macaulay Honors Program would give me resources and flexibility, and the city would open doors to many opportunities for me and expand my network.

Baruch is a hands-off school. No one chases you or hands you opportunities. You have to look, ask, push. But that’s something I’ve been doing my whole life, and it’s where I’ve thrived the most.

Once I got to Baruch, my education became something I built. Baruch is a hands-off school. No one chases you or hands you opportunities. You have to know where to look and ask. But that’s something I’ve been doing my whole life. I conducted research and presented a poster on 311 usage in gentrified NYC neighborhoods, winning first place in Public Affairs and third in Business at Baruch’s Research and Creative Inquiry Expo. In Fall 2024, I studied abroad in Madrid, where living and learning in a different culture expanded both my independence and my worldview.

I learn best by doing, and most of what I know about marketing comes from the internship and work experience.

At Hudson River Park Trust, where I spent a summer as a Seasonal Marketing Associate, I managed the park’s seasonal ad campaigns and media partnerships for their public programs and sustainability initiatives. I managed the budget, weekly e-newsletter that reached more than 35,000 subscribers, and social media calendar that shaped how the public engaged with the park’s events. It was my introduction to marketing within a nonprofit and public-service environment, and I realized how much I enjoyed work that holds community impact.

My most recent experience at Laurel Road, KeyBank’s digital banking platform for healthcare professionals, pushed me further into the world of strategic marketing than I’d ever been before. As a Partner Marketing Intern, I supported B2B and B2B2C initiatives that were far more complex than anything I’d worked on in the past. I helped audit partner-facing materials to understand where messaging aligned and where it fell short, presenting a strategic recommendation on how to improve the enablement process to senior leaders as my final project. What surprised me was how much behind the scenes collaboration goes into something the public never even sees. It taught me how to think more systematically about communication. Not just what a brand says, but how information flows between partners, and how that flow can either strengthen or strain a relationship.

It was the first role where I felt myself stepping into the strategic side of marketing, not just the creative side, and realizing I could do both.

Through the AAARI Innovators Fellowship, I led a core project directly targeting a problem my group and I noticed in the Asian American community which is that asian owned small businesses don’t have a strong online presence. We focused specifically on the restaurant industry and thought of ways they can improve their digital strategy, in terms of web search, online reviews, and social media. Partnering with a local asian restaurant, we helped design a digital strategy for them based on our research. This consulting effort made me really enjoy designing a strategy for a client. 

All of these pieces, my upbringing, academics, internships, leadership have led me to where I am today and in deciding what I want to be doing post-grad. I want to use marketing to support communities and missions that matter. This goes to show how there is not one right path to success. I am excited to see where the future will lead me!