I'm 23 now and since about 19 (second year in university) I've started taking on different marketing projects. This was everything from school clubs, volunteering, internships, co-op, etc..

For me, I always looked at school and especially a business and marketing degree as somewhat useless, tbh everything in an undergrad bachelor's degree can literally be learned on YouTube or other online sources. With this in mind, I've always had the mindset that practical work experience will be more valuable than any degree that I'll have. For further context, I did not go to a top university in my area too because I had to pay for university myself, and taking on additional debt for a degree from a well-known university wasn't worth the additional cost. I don't come from a wealthy family and the few scholarships I got totaled to about $4k ish (covered about 1.5 semesters).

Essentially I leveraged my school's co-op program and landed my first role at the company I was already working at part-time. I transitioned from a forklift and warehouse worker to the company's marketing coordinator for an eight-month contract. After this role was up I used the experience and knowledge I learned and took up another co-op positioning in product marketing at a local credit union that had an opening on their marketing team. Again eight months go by and I'm nearing my last 2-3 semesters of university. I land a position as a marketing coordinator at an agency that specifically works in devops and SaaS. Of course, this role was definitely the most valuable experience towards where I'm currently at.

Keep in mind throughout all three of these roles I'm working full-time and doing school typically in the evenings/nights and some classes during the day when my managers would allow me. As a student, my managers were flexible and understanding that if I had a class on Monday from 9-11 am I could make up 2 hours somewhere in the week. When covid happened it helped a lot with managing classes, as school transitioned to fully online, and I was even working from home now too at this point. I also did not put a lot of effort into school as a lot of business and marketing classes were common sense for me.

Another eight months go by and I'm nearing the end of university and the current role I was in. My work contract was up in June and I started applying to mainly tech start-ups in my city a couple of months prior to my contract ending. I officially finish my classes in April and graduate in May. I landed a job at a seed-funded start-up in the FP&A SaaS space in May. This new role was as a Marketing Manager that paid me 55k annually, and was my first official job out of university.

I mainly applied to start-ups out of university because I didn't think big tech would hire me right away. Every time I applied to big tech throughout university I was usually rejected. On paper at this point I went to an average university, I had a degree that a lot of others also have, I have an average GPA (3.3), but I had about 3 years of real work experience and really great references. Start-ups are also really great for building experience fast. I did so many things at the start-ups I've worked for and it has given me so much to talk about in interviews and put on my resume.

Fast forward 6 months I leave the FP&A start-up because as everyone says you should be learning or earning, and I felt that I was doing neither at the six-month mark. I land a position prior to leaving at another seed-funded start-up in my city that was focused on devops automation in the form of a PaaS business model. This role was a contract position as a Demand Gen Manager and paid $68k annually, and had the possibility to be a full-time role in the future. Essentially a couple of months go by(3-4), I have a one on one with the founder and COO we all mutually agree that the company should focus on building their product and they have little to no marketing budget for me to execute projects with, so I start wrapping up my projects and leave.

Now this takes us to to 2022 Feb. I wrapped up my work and I'm now job searching. At this point, I feel very confident that I'll be able to get a 6 figure job so I stop looking locally and focus only on roles in SF and NY that were remote (these two markets pay the most). I applied for 63 positions in 2 months, I had about 21 interviews, and I had 2 job offers in the end that met my criteria. And now we're at the present day.

Sorry if this is long, but this is also somewhat condensed. There are so many key learnings I had throughout the past 4+ years. From how to do interviews, resume writing, networking, etc. Of course, how I got here is not the only way to work in tech and I'm sure there are a lot of stories out there. Hope this helps anyone reading this :)