Interview is edited for length and clarity.
Why did you choose to study at Simmons?
Simmons was my first choice. I knew I wanted to be in Boston. I didn't like the idea of a huge school like Boston University or Northeastern, because I didn't just want to be a number.
I knew coming out of high school that I was interested in journalism and communications, and I liked the program that Simmons had to offer. I wasn't necessarily looking for an all-women's college; it just happened to fit, and I ended up loving it.
What skills did you learn at Simmons that you continue to use today?
The heart of everything I do comes down to the skills that I developed learning to be a journalist. I’m on the flip side of journalism now. If I can’t see the news story, if I can’t figure out a way to write press materials that effectively tell a journalist, ‘Here’s the news and this is why it is important,’ then I wouldn’t be good at what I do.
My skills as a writer are probably the ones that I use more than any other. It’s like Journalism 101, where you learn how to write a news story. There, you learn to put the most important information first, because if an editor is going to cut the story, they’re going to cut from the bottom. If you're going to write an effective press release, you follow that same model.
If you can start thinking like a journalist, that person will appreciate that you respect their time. You're thinking about, ‘How do I present this information in a way that's effective and useful?’ If you do this, journalists will take your calls and respond to your emails. Over time, you build that level of trust with them. For me, I found that long-standing relationships that I have with members of the press are because they know I won’t send them information that isn’t of interest or relevant to their beat. If I'm sending a pitch to a specific journalist, they'll open my email because they know I'm not going to waste their time.
It all goes back to what I learned at Simmons about being a solid reporter or good editor. It’s just flipping to the other side of that relationship.
What impact did attending a women’s-centered college have on you?
The greatest impact that Simmons had on me was by being a women's college. Simmons is masterful at building the self-confidence of the students and sending us all out into the world fully believing we could tackle anything we set our minds to doing. They instilled such a sense of purpose and potential to achieve whatever we set out to accomplish, and almost to a fault.
What I discovered, and I think some of my friends discovered when they started their careers as well, is that Simmons did such a great job of building up this self-esteem, preparing students with several internships and actual working experience. You walk out of there thinking, ‘I am ready to land fully formed in my first job, and I can do it.’ But what they don't prepare you for is the fact that everybody starts at the bottom, and you have to pay your dues.
My first job was a rude awakening because I would get sent on errands to pick up my boss’s dry cleaning, return her movie rentals, and fill her prescriptions. I was furious, because I'd already had real working experience through my internships. I knew I could do so much more. I thought, ‘Wait a minute! This isn't what I just spent four years learning how to do.’ But I will tell you, looking back, the most I learned about public relations, I learned in the year and a half at that job.
There's something wonderful about being in an environment like a women's college. I’m not going to say it isn't competitive, because women can be fierce competitors with one another. But overwhelmingly, it was a supportive environment. To sit in a classroom with other intelligent women who are all eager to learn and figure out their place in the world and how they can have an impact on society is invaluable.
There's something special about a women's college environment that is unlike anything else. For many people, unless you've experienced it, it's hard to understand what that is.
Another part of what I liked at Simmons is that as soon as I stepped onto campus, there was this sense of accomplishment and awareness of all the alumnae/i that have come before. You see the upperclassman as a first-year, and you get a sense of what the young women are doing. Then you hear extraordinary stories of what older alumnae/i are doing in their careers, so you think, ‘If they can do it, why can’t I?’
What advice would you give current students?
My advice: Be confident and be flexible. And I say be flexible because I don't believe a career journey is a straight line or path from A to Z. To achieve the most you can, you have to be open to opportunities that are off the straight path.
The confidence piece is huge. You'll come out of Simmons having that in abundance, and don't lose that. I think especially today, however, we're living in a very uncertain world, and people don't stay in careers the way they might have when I was first coming out of Simmons or for the generations before me. People seem to have a pretty clear path in mind, and they left school and they started on that path, and they just stayed in that lane.
To succeed now, you have to be willing to be open to taking a different path off that course. It doesn't mean that you don't come back and keep going, but then, a few years down the line, you might take a slightly different course. Ultimately, the more experiences that you can have, whether through internships or jobs, there's always going to be something that you can take and learn from that's going to hone your skills even more.
Where you end up might be someplace completely different from where you expect, but it might end up being even more rewarding. If you're not willing to be flexible and roll with where the road may take you, you'll miss out on that.