so what really makes me skye?
So who is Skye? Well, I’m a lot of things, but at my core, I am just a girl who wants to be happy. What makes me happy? Well, that's changed a lot over the years.
Dance
Dance was the most important thing in my life for most of my life. I started dancing when I was 4 and did dance alongside gymnastics until I was 11. Then, I decided dance was going to be my main focus, and I was going to start competing. I stopped gymnastics and spent about 8 hours a week in the studio from ages 11-14. Once I hit high school, dance really became everything to me. I was in the studio for 20+ hours a week in technique classes, learning dances, perfecting my solos, and helping teach other classes. I found comfort in dance, it was a constant in my life that was ever-changing.
As I progressed in my dancing journey, and dance became more and more my entire life, it was much less glamorous than it originally seemed. I was moved into advanced and preprofessional classes, where the teachers weren’t as encouraging, and the girls weren’t as nice. While I did make some great friends from dance, there were definitely other dancers who made practices much less fun. Our teachers started commenting on our bodies, and we started comparing ourselves to each other.
I stopped enjoying dance.
However, I was too far in to quit. I had spent all my life dedicating myself to this art, and I only had two years left. I had to see it though.
Like most things, dance changed completely with COVID. All of our practices were moved from the studio to the various parts of our houses that were always just too small for what our teachers wanted us to do. However, my dance friends were where I found peace during COVID. We spent so many nights on the phone, up way too late, but it didn’t matter because there was nothing else to do. Honestly, I tribute my love of graphic design to these nights. We spent hours on end making memes that only we understood. We had a shared trauma that none of our other friends could understand, and we coped with memes of our horrible dance teachers, and of our favorite dance teacher. Memes of the girls who were mean, and memes of ourselves. I have a folder of probably 300+ memes from these nights, and when I feel homesick they are some of the first things I look back on.
Eventually, we had our last competition season and our last recital, and we all graduated. Some of my dance friends went on to art schools for dance, and others, like me, went to school for something completely different.
Chemistry Major
My whole life I loved science. It was always my favorite subject in school, and I always excelled in it. When I was applying to colleges, I had no clue what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, how could I? All I knew was that I loved science. I applied to each school with Chemistry as my intended major, and I eventually decided to come to the University of Minnesota with a Chemical Engineering major. I was so excited. Moving to college was a huge deal for me. I was an only child of divorced parents amid a pandemic, needless to say, my parents were a little much for me.
During my first semester, I was struggling to find the motivation to do any of my homework or go to any of my classes. At first, I wrote it off as being a college student and having freedom for the first time, but then I realized that I had always been a great student and this wasn’t me. I tried my hardest to get back into the habit of going to class, and getting my all homework done (well all of it except my physics homework), but I was just dreading going back to school the next semester. I was thrilled to go back to campus, but not to classes. About half way though my second semester I decided I needed to figure something else out. I could not let this be what I did for the rest of my life.
I looked through every single one of the majors the University had to offer with my friend Austin, a Marketing major, and thought that Marketing could be fun, and I’ve always been creative. But then I talked to him about his classes and those didn’t seem like they were creative at all. I kept on down the list of majors and found Strategic Communication. I read about it on the Hubbard website and it seemed like all the best parts of Marketing. Within the week I applied to the major and was finally excited about school again.
Becoming a Professional
As you can probably assume if you are reading this blog, I got into the Strategic Communications major. My first semester of sophomore year I took my first journalism class. While it wasn’t related much to my major, it was a required course. In this class we had guest speakers talk to us about different opportunities within the University. One of the upper level teachers came into our class and talked about Ad Club. I was feeling behind in the major and decided this was how I was going to catch up.
Ad Club
I went to my first Ad Club meeting with Austin. He was my rock in this new world. We met people and decided to come back the next week. I went to every meeting that semester, and when they opened up applications for a social media manager I applied. Spring semester of sophomore year I was the social media manager of Ad Club, and in classes that felt like they applied to my future career. I was so excited. Through Ad Club, I heard about Backpack, an on-campus Advertising Agency, and the Gopher Sports Marketing Internship. I applied to both.
As I entered my junior year, I became the Vice President of Ad Club and took on more responsibility. Eventually, I became president, and now I run leadership meetings with our faculty advisors, facilitate the general meetings, and reach out to each speaker for the club. Through Ad Club, I have learned more about being a leader than any of my classes. I learned not only how to facilitate large group meetings, but also how to efficiently hold a small group meeting with the leaders.
Backpack
I landed the position at Backpack and started in the fall semester of my Junior year. In Backpack I have truly learned how an agency works. I have learned about the best ways to interact with a client, the right questions to ask them, and how to tailor the information you give in each presentation to the client that you are presenting to.
Gopher Sports
Another product of Ad Club, who’s surprised? I joined Gopher Sports Marketing because I heard you got to stand sideline at the football games, and that seemed really cool. As I dove into my year with them, I realized it was going to be so much more. I got to write the Student Weekly, that got sent to every student every week. With this project I learned the importance of slowing down and checking my work. If I made a mistake, everyone saw it. This was not my only task as an Intern, however, it was definitely where I learned and grew the most throughout the year.
Northmarq
The summer after my Junior year I got my first internship. I worked for a commercial real estate company as a Marketing Intern and learned so much. I spent most of my summer using SEO keyword rich meta descriptions for every blog on their website. I learned what words Google likes, and how to make our PDFs more accessible. While commercial real estate wasn’t the most glamorous topic, I learned a lot technically. I also learned how to exist in a corporate setting. I was nervous going into the summer that I wouldn’t fit in, and hwile I had some adjusting to do, it wasn’t as scary as I thought. Honestly, it made me completely consider the corporate side of Marketing, which is something I never thought I would want to do.
Next Steps
So where am I going to go with all of this? Well, who really knows? Obviously I want a full-time role after graduation, but where will I be? I think I have spent more time worrying about what I am going to do post-grad than I’ve spent on homework all of college. I have come to the conclusion that it will work out. I have come to terms with the uncertainty that is post-graduation. I will apply to all of the jobs that have an interesting description, whether I think I can get them or not, and see what happens, because I am not where I thought I would be when I was graduating high school, so who says that I will be where I am expecting to be in four years from now? Basically, I’m going to see what happens and what makes me happy, and go form there.
