In 2012, I left college with a sociology degree and a resume almost exclusively focused on field hockey. Thanks to good timing and previous connections, I found what I thought would be a strong career starting point in an entry level position at Tommy Hilfiger. “Do what you love and a career will follow,” I’d always been told. What could go wrong?
It took two years for me to realize exactly what would go wrong. While my love for fashion continued, the feeling did not transcend into my work. I wasn’t the glamorous Meryl Streep from The Devil Wears Prada hand selecting runway styles. My merchandising role confined me to a cubicle where I analyzed sales, planned promotions, and placed buys. The reports needed to complete my duties didn’t evolve with the style seasons. The illustrious world of fashion quickly became worn, redundant, and frustrating. I realized I wanted a job that provided constant growth, difficult challenges, and unpredictability. It was time to look elsewhere.
After some investigation, I concluded that I loved the variety and technological-focus of marketing, but needed to find a place that was open to innovation. I started looking online for new jobs but was hit hard by the seemingly impossible catch 22 every career changer knows. How do you gain experience in a new field when entry-level positions require experience? My first thought was to go back to school. Fortunately, I only got as far as buying the GMAT books before I stumbled across the MediaMath website. As soon as I found the Marketing Engineer Program, and I knew that I’d found my answer. This program was the entire package – I would receive the necessary ad-tech training and exposure needed to get my foot in the door. And the icing on the cake was they encouraged applicants with unrelated backgrounds!
The six months I spent in the the program allowed me to build connections, learn without judgment, and create my desired career path. Our ten-person cohort rotated through over eight departments, where we developed our soft skills and technical knowledge. While the program was heavily focused on campaign management and optimization, it also provided us with the ability to explore other fields. This is how I connected with Jon Pollack, a Vice President on Product and my unexpected guide through the technical terrain.
The Marketing Engineer Program strives to place every participant in a full-time role at MediaMath or one of our partner companies, but Product was not a traditional endpoint. When initially weighing the possibility of this unique path, it seemed like a suicide jump to go from clothing designers to software engineers. I wouldn’t be able to add value to the engineers by telling them their code would look better in a certain color. I was honest (maybe to a fault) about my interest in Product but my fear of lacking the technical background possessed by so many of my peers. However, Jon was extremely encouraging. He stressed that if you start off with the right materials (communication skills, an eagerness to learn, and the ability to comprehend technical concepts), you can rework them to create what you want. He agreed to do a trial run where he’d give me lessons if I committed to doing extra work outside the program.
Straight away, he threw me headfirst into coding, reasoning that it would be beneficial down the road. Starting off, I was intimidated and it was a struggle, to say the least. I didn’t know the difference between interactive and script mode, which forced me to retype every command in my terminal whenever I forgot a colon or an indentation. Eventually, after a lot of trial and error, textbook lessons, and sessions with Jon, I gained a basic understanding of loops, conditionals, and functions. As the lessons continued, I also learned about the inner workings of the ad-tech world (a much more complicated place than what I found in fashion) and I gained a deeper appreciation for the complex problems the backend teams are consistently solving.
While I’m far from being a hardcore coder, I have worked with Jon to write Python scripts that analyze global deals and parse through bid requests thus saving me from the time-consuming redundancy a manual process would have caused. Looking back a year, I wouldn’t even have put this in the realm of possibilities. Thanks to the Marketing Engineer Program, I was able to drastically and successfully change careers. Through this program I found an incredible mentor who continues to teach and challenge me everyday. In the end, I was able to swap buying clothes with buying media and I couldn’t be happier!