6 Lessons in 6 Months

I’ve been working in and around the communications industry since I was in college. It’s only been since August, however, that I took the leap and took a full-time social media manager role at St. Lawrence University. This week marks six months since I started this job, and it feels like the fastest six months of my life. Admittedly, a lot happened in those six months. Personally, my brother moved, my husband and I planned and celebrated our second wedding reception, my parents announced their move to Texas, and we’ve been on the wild ride of trying to conceive. Professionally, like everywhere in the world, we’ve had to navigate the ebbs and flows of the pandemic, and like every higher ed institution, ride the highs and lows of campus life, all while learning the ins and outs of a new job and department. Through all of this, as I think back, I’ve learned a lot. Obviously, I’ve learned about working in social media and about the nuances of higher ed communications, but more importantly, I’ve learned a fair amount about myself.

Listen Up:

One of my brother-in-law’s favorite facts about me is the fact that I use YikYak. Professionally. Yes, you read that correctly. I start each day scrolling through the anonymous thoughts of college students on the recently resurrected YikYak mobile app. And there’s a pretty good reason for that. Mostly it’s as terrible as you think, but sometimes it is incredibly important. Working in social media is ALL about relationships. It’s about knowing your audience and meeting them where they are. Like in any relationship, that means you have to be listening to what others are saying, listening critically and carefully. At least 50% of my job is about listening — seeing what student clubs and organizations are saying in their social media accounts, what the world is saying about the University online, what the nation is saying in the news, and yes, what students are saying on YikYak. How else can we have a conversation with them? How else can we tell our audience that we care about them if we don’t actually listen to what they are talking about? This focus on listening translates across disciplines in communications — on a recent story for the University where I interviewed students, my most used question became ‘tell me more about that.’ It’s made me think about how can I be better about listening across all areas in my life. What are the people that matter to me saying? What are they caring about? Who do I need to say ‘tell me more about that, help me understand’ to?

My Biggest Professional Strengths are Personal:

Last week I had a one on one meeting with the VP of our department, during which he said “Well Amelia, you are an extremely genuine and warm person, and I believe that you naturally put people at ease.” I’d been briefing him about a project I’d just started working on, one that would involve interviewing students for video. I’d mentioned that other colleagues had been impressed with my interview skills on a recent piece I wrote for the University, and thought I’d do well taking those skills to video. It gave me pause — I hadn’t really expected that level of praise from our VP. If you look at the skills you need to work in communications, sincerity and warmth aren’t obviously at the top of the list. In my job application, the qualifications mentioned things like ‘excellent attention to detail and time management, creativity and collaborative.” These are the things I read about employers seeking. Sincerity and warmth, tenderness of heart and empathy, we chalk up those to personality traits, not professional skills. Yet, this conversation with my VP reminded me that I can have as many time management processes as I want, what sets me apart is my personality. The way I naturally treat those around me has much more of an impact on the quality of my work than any ability I have to multitask. This conversation made me wonder, how long have I been valuing myself on only those professional skills I’d developed and not my heart? And moreover, it made me all the more thankful to work in a place that had been valuing me for those personal traits all along.

All In This Together:

I use a handful of fancy tools and applications in my job: Adobe Creative Cloud, the Airtable scheduling platform, top-notch listening software from Campus Sonar, plus Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s analytics platforms, to name a few. Yet, for all the fancy (and enormously helpful) tools, my most powerful assets are the people I work alongside every day. I have the pleasure of collaborating with incredible photographers, writers, and strategists. These are the people that I bounce ideas off of, the people who get me out of writer’s block, and the people I do likewise for. I bring them the shreds of an idea, something that I barely envision, and after a few minutes of back and forth, with my creative juices flowing again, content appears fully formed in my mind. And in between it all, they’re the people that make me laugh. 40+ hours a week, these people empower me to be more creative and inspire me to be a better person.

“Take Chances, Make Mistakes, Get Messy!”

If you’re anything like me, and you grew up watching Ms. Frizzle and the Magic School Bus, the show’s catchphrase ‘Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!’ is somewhere in the back of your mind. I never would have expected this phrase to apply to my career in communications and social media and to live rent-free in my mind 40+ hours a week. Yet, I could have read every article, watched every webinar, and listened to every podcast about social media, and still there would have been things about this job that catch me off guard. There are DMs we receive that I never, ever, expect.

Navigating social media algorithms feels like a constant game of whack-a-mole. A post that works well one day may not work as well the next. There’s a certain thrill to the unexpected nature of this work; it’s a puzzle that is new every day, requiring new ideas and strategies. More often than not, I think about Ms. Frizzle’s catchphrase — at least the ‘take chances’ part. Admittedly I do try my hardest to avoid making life messy for myself. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t try to come up with as many ideas as I can, before weeding out the weak ones. And sometimes those ideas are chances worth taking — little chances, like switching up the times I post something, and sometimes bigger chances, like an post we haven’t tried before.

Finding My Center:

If you work in communications, you know that crises often come out of left field. Add the emotional microcosm of higher ed and college campuses, and you never know what the day will bring. There have been a number of stressful weeks that came our way over the last six months, and I don’t expect the next six to be any different. Growing up in this college community and having been a college student myself, in particular one that worked for Residential Life, Marketing, AND Admissions, these instances of stressful times didn’t catch me off guard. What surprised me was how grounded I would be in such situations. Sure, there have been times when I worried how a caption or a post would go over, but ultimately, I found that I would become exceedingly practical. Don’t get me wrong — there have been stressful days; I have been stressed from time to time. But I found a kind of clarity in those moments, a clarity that allowed me to compartmentalize stress and respond to my job without being overwhelmed by the moment at hand. It made me better at my job, it made me a more supportive colleague, and most importantly it made me a stronger, more confidant person in my personal life.

Kicking Imposter Syndrome:

Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the last 6 months has been that I’m actually good at this! Perhaps I first realized this while prepping content for MLK Day the Friday before, knowing that students would be moving into campus, we didn’t have great visuals, and that we wanted any content to be impactful, not performative. Thanks to some quick thinking and team collaboration, we came up with a solution and a post that resonated with our community. Then again, maybe it was this week when I realized that our Women’s Squash Team were champions in their regional league, and knew instantly what content needed to happen, or responding with a quick content strategy session with my colleagues upon realizing that we’d just been tagged in a tweet about one of our students being named to Team USA for the Winter Paralympics. Or perhaps it was when a good friend, impressed with my professional resume and personal social media asked me if I would be the social media manager for his photography business as a weekend side hustle. (Honestly, this was one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever been asked and already a highlight for 2022!) Since August, I’ve felt imposter syndrome lurking around the corner, but recently I’ve felt it less and less all the time. Cause, you know what? I love what I do. I love the place I do it for. And I’m crushing it.