 Good evening and welcome to our inaugural alumni panel and social organized by the School of Communication Arts and Media in the College of Arts and Sciences. My name is Catherine Schwab and as the Director of the School of Communication Arts and Media it is a pleasure to welcome back four alumni, Kate Dillon, Ben Doody, Melody, Sarah Fino and Carmen Rita Wong. They will share some remarks and insights with you. The program on your chair includes their biographies. This evening's panel is generously supported by the departments of communication, visual and performing arts, English and modern languages and literatures, the four departments that comprise the School of Communication Arts and Media. Additional support comes from the Humanities Institute, the Faculty Committee on Public Lectures and Events and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. This event is in association with alumni relations and the Academic and Career Development Center. Additionally, I thank Michelle Lesko, Program Coordinator for her tremendous help. Before we proceed, I am happy to announce that the School of Communication Arts and Media is organizing an undergraduate conference entitled, Converging and Emerging Media for Next September, here at Fairfield. We are delighted to share the news that our keynote speaker will be Savannah Sellers, co-host of NBC's news program Stay Tuned for the Snapchat platform. More information about the September conference will be forthcoming. Now let's proceed with remarks by Dr. Richard Greenwald, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, followed by our four alumni. Then we will open up the floor to the question and answer period. Dean Greenwald. Thank you very much. My first task was to turn this on so I was successful. I want to thank Kathy Schwab for coming up with this idea and working with the talented group of faculty and identifying some wonderful alum to bring back to campus to share their wisdom with you as you start thinking about your careers and the opportunities after you graduate from Fairfield. They took time, our four alum, on the panel to come here. They're going to share their experiences with you, and I know you're going to learn an awful lot. I also want to remind you to take advantage of several opportunities that you have before you. There is the Career Center, and I would suggest that you check out all the opportunities that they have to make sure that you have your resume up to date. You know when the career fair is going to be. I don't have the date, I should, but you can look that up. They're a wonderful resource, and you need to take advantage of them as much as you possibly can. I also want to thank you all for coming tonight. When you put something like this on, you're never sure who's going to show up, but this shows that you're dedicated and care about the industry. You want to hear from the alum and we want to make these events as successful as possible. This is the first in a series of alumni events that we're going to do through the four schools within the college, and I'm heartened to see that there's a positive response. With that, I'm going to step off and let the experts have their conversation, and I look forward to hearing your questions as well. Thanks. I have the pleasure of going first, but I promise to be brief because I think the most important thing that we want to get to is answering any questions from you guys. I'll give you a brief background on how I got up here because it feels like not that long ago I was back there. I graduated in 2008, a communications major and in the honors program in the middle of the recession. It was a very different mindset coming out of school, and I have to say Fairfield, and I'm going to give my first plug, Fairfield really prepared us for that because we were well-rounded. We had a great core, a great, very well-rounded education with incredible professors that could help us along the way. I had a total panic attack spring semester of my senior year when all of my roommates who were in Dolen and going out and getting jobs in accounting and finance all had their jobs totally figured out by second semester. I see some people nodding their heads. It's a panic attack for any high-performing comms major to English majors. Jobs just don't work like that, and that was really hard to understand. I wanted to have it all figured out, but I didn't, and that was okay. I started the interview process again. It's the middle of the recession. You know things are going to be challenging in the job market. I got a full-time job offer, much to the surprise and delight of my parents thinking, it's going to be fine, she's got job offers. I turned them down because nothing was really exciting to me. Nothing was making me look forward to graduation. I didn't really feel inspired by anything I was seeing. So I kept looking, and if I have to say, one thing that really kept me on that path was having done internships at Fairfield. Even a bad internship can really prepare you to figure out what you don't want to do. I had great internships and a couple of not-so-great internships. Most of mine were in mass media at Fox and NBC. Again, those were totally invaluable, but I realized I loved working with media, but maybe not necessarily on that side of the camera. So I kept looking, I kept looking. And I came across an opportunity at a small public relations firm in New York, and I remember coming out of that interview and just feeling like I had met some of the most passionate people in the workforce that I had encountered yet. So I went with my gut and decided to follow passionate people. I said, this is a group of people who love what they do, and I think are really smart, and I could learn a lot from them. So I took a chance and took, again, to the chagrin of my parents now, an apprenticeship, which means it's not totally guaranteed, it doesn't have health care, all the things you really want to get right out of college. But something in my gut told me that this company was going places and it was run by incredibly smart people who were willing to invest in talent. So even when the market was crashing, they made it a priority to invest in talent. And I took that job and fast forward eight years later, our company has tripled in size and we keep putting that emphasis on hiring talent, whatever the market is doing. So that's how I got here. Again, some twists and turns along the road, maybe. But my one bit of advice and something I learned at Fairfield was I followed my passions, but I also followed passionate people. I wanted to make sure I found opportunities where I knew I'd be challenged and learn and have people that were willing to invest in talent because I'd always felt that way at Fairfield and I wanted my first job to do the same thing. I am a total unicorn in PR because I've actually stayed there since I graduated. It's okay if that doesn't happen. Most people will stay in their first PR job for maybe 18 months and that's okay. Again, just like an internship, even a not great first job experience might teach you what you don't want to do and what you're looking for in your next company. So one of the things that I, again, I loved about my job was that working at an agency, so working at a PR agency, which is what I do, I feel like I've had five different jobs over the course of the eight years that I've been there. Recently, I was approached by Dr. Zhang, who is the head of the communications department, asking me if I'd want to take on an adjunct professor position at Fairfield U. It was an incredibly exciting offer. I would love to get back on Fairfield, love to be part of the campus again, but my initial reaction, to be completely honest, was to say no. I don't have time. I'm sure everyone up here doesn't have time to do anything else than what we're already doing. My first instinct was to say no. But one of the things that's always challenged me about my current job is I always want to put myself a little bit over my skis, meaning to the point where I'm out of my comfort zone, I'm feeling even a little uncomfortable, to challenge yourself and to learn a new skill, figure out something that you haven't had an opportunity to do. So I tried it. So I recognize a couple of phases here. So I just began teaching as an adjunct professor in the communications department for the public relations program, which actually didn't even exist when I went to school at Fairfield. So I think one of the things that shows this as well is if you don't know what you want to do, you're an upper class and sitting here at any level and you're not quite sure what you want to do, just follow the core and take classes that are interesting and inspiring to you. I think that's a good way to figure out what you do want to do and what you're passionate about. And a lot of the fields that we're talking about, I mean, there are some very practical things like accounting where you probably have to have an accounting degree to go out into the world and be an accountant, right? But if you want to try PR, if you want to try media, it's okay if that wasn't your major. Again, I think take the classes that are interesting to you that are going to challenge you and then find those out-of-classroom opportunities like an internship, like networking or panel events to give you a glimpse into a lot of different areas that you might be interested in and just give them a try. Put your hand up, get over your skis a little bit and when you feel uncomfortable, it's probably a good thing because it means you're trying something that's exciting and a little bit scary, which for me, those have always been the most rewarding opportunities. So I think that's my spiel. That's good. I'll pass it over. All right, that's a tough act to follow. So thank you all for coming out and thanks to everybody for having us. I came to school here because I wanted to be a sports writer when I was a high school kid. I was a high school baseball player. I had one career hit, my whole career. So I was just about the worst high school baseball player in the area. But I wanted to be a sports writer and I knew a couple of things. I know a whole lot about Fairfield, but I knew Fairfield had Division I sports. The men's basketball program has never been that great. I was at the game last night, which they won, somewhat miraculously. Then and now, Fairfield was falling short of going to the InstaBlade tournament, but they had a Division I men's basketball program and women's basketball program that daily newspapers wrote about every single day. So unlike a lot of the stuff that goes on campus, there was stuff going on that you could cover as a member of student media that people outside the campus were actually going to care about and actually going to read about. So I could have gone to a place, if I had gotten in, I ended up not applying, but if I had gotten in, I could have gone to a place like Syracuse, which is a factory for journalism and for sports journalism, or a place like Northwestern, which has a really nationally renowned journalism program. But I knew that if I had gone to Syracuse or Northwestern or Boston University or a big school like that with 20,000 students, that I would have had to have been fighting with everyone else I was competing with just to be able to cover volleyball or cover anything, get my name in the paper. I knew at Fairfield with a small school, I could probably come in here and write about a whole lot of stuff right out of the gate. So I decided to apply, and I just realized earlier today that Melody, who I never met before, was my tour guide when I was a senior in high school. And she's from Feeding Hills, Massachusetts near Springfield, I'm from South Hadley. Any Western mass people in the house? Okay, where are you from? Okay, from Lenox, all right. So no bullshit here at all. Melody gave a really good tour and she got me to come in. So I applied, I got in, and that's kind of how I ended up here. I didn't know exactly how things were going to play out. One thing that I did have a pretty good feel for was that the mirror, where I ended up being editor my senior year, was going to be the type of place that if you had the hutzpah to show up and at least go to a meeting and raise your hand, that even if you were a freshman who had never stepped foot on campus, you were going to be able to write a story and get it published in the paper, which I thought was pretty cool. And I pretty much never left. Ended up covering basketball. I was right that I got to cover men's basketball and women's basketball as a freshman. I was assistant sports editor of the mirror as a sophomore, sports editor as a junior, and then editor as a senior. So that part worked out well and Kate said something that's really important that is maybe the most important thing I'd emphasize. Covering sports for the mirror introduced me to people who covered sports for the Connecticut Post and the Stanford Advocate and the Hartford Current and News Channel 12. So I got to meet people who were doing the same thing I was doing. They were in a professional setting at Alumni Hall or at the arena at Harbor Yard and that opened some doors to things like internships. I did an internship at the Connecticut Post. I did an internship at the Hartford Current and then my senior year, I basically was free unpaid labor for the Stanford Advocate. I went to every basketball game. I didn't send anybody so I said I'll write a game story for you for free and they were happy to take the free labor as many newspapers certainly are. So I did that. That led me to a job at the Trentonian which is a daily newspaper in Trenton, New Jersey. Any Central New Jersey people here? Where are you from? From Princeton. So Trenton happens to have an interesting distinction which is it is the small city in America that still to this day has two daily newspapers. Many places don't even have one. They have two, the Trentonian and the Trenton Times. So I got a foot in the door at the Trentonian covering college football and college basketball and from there this was a year before Kate but newspapers were contracting at a pretty rapid clip. They're contracting a lot more quickly now and as anybody knows who's at least thinking about getting into that line of work papers are closing, there are a lot of layoffs. I was able and I think this is sort of a theme I would touch on in general nobody likes to see anyone they're working with lose their jobs nobody ever likes to see downsizing but if you're there and you're willing to work really hard and all of a sudden you're part of a staff of like four instead of ten then there are opportunities. I think that's absolutely the case for anyone who's in media whether it's print or broadcast now. Resources are stretched thin and people appreciate it if you're willing in my case to go cover a college basketball game and then go lay out a bunch of pages afterward and get the paper out. So I did that for a few years I ended up coming back up to Connecticut I did about two years at the Hearst Papers in Connecticut as a breaking news editor so at that point I sort of ventured out of sports got into more general news and breaking news from there I was at Haven Register as a group managing editor for two years in 2014 the guy who was the editor-in-chief of the Trentonian when I was there, a guy named Aaron Noble called and asked if I wanted to come be a managing editor at Heavy which I was not very familiar with at all at the time but is now was a pretty big player in the national news landscape then has grown a good deal since. Heavy is a New York based national breaking news website we cover everything from politics will be all over the State of the Union tonight to video games to technology to sports and Aaron called me in 2014 and asked if I'd come on as his managing editor at the time he was the only editorial employee in the whole company and I was the second so Heavy's been around since 1999 but it's been around in various different iterations and it very much has a start-up kind of feel to it right now we still only have six employees in 2015 I hired a guy I knew from Fairfield named Tom Cleary who was editor-in-chief of the mirror in 2010 as our news editor so we have three editorial employees and two of us are a Fairfield alum and former mirror editor so I've been at this for the past four years we have a group of freelance contributors they're independent journalists who publish content on our platform and they range from people who are fairly young some of them a year or two out of college in extreme cases even right out of college or still in college ranging from that to people who have worked at major metropolitan daily newspapers for a long time so I work with these folks I live pretty much across the street from campus maybe whoever wants to get a cup of coffee just let me know and spending time emailing around the phone most days with journalists who are in Chicago or Milwaukee or California or anywhere else so that's pretty much the long short of it and like I said Melody is the reason that I'm here in the first place so I'll turn it over to her well thank you to everybody for being here and thank you to Fairfield for inviting us to be a part of this panel my name is Melody Serifino I'm a 2005 graduate I was a double major in French and communications with a minor in media studies with a specific focus on television I did a number of internships when I was at Fairfield including working for late night with Conan O'Brien when he was still in New York working at a local news station and the internship that I was actually least excited about but ended up being the most valuable to me which was working for the Fairfield University PR office I had no idea what PR was all about as Kate mentioned there was not a PR class or major when we were here I just had some time in my schedule it was the last semester of my senior year and I wanted to fill it with something that I thought would be productive and look great on my resume and it ended up being one of the best choices I made because it helped me to realize that it was a viable industry for me PR requires a lot of writing and I was able to do writing and research and be more than just another gopher on the set of a TV show not really learning much I currently run a company called Number 29 Communications which is a media relations firm we work with companies and individuals who are in the sustainability social impact and arts and innovation spaces and our job for them is to help raise awareness of the good work that they're doing and to get stories about them in the media the PR industry is changing rapidly and we've been around for almost five years now but one of the things that we've had to adapt to and learn over the course of those five years is how to keep up with the changing media landscape there are less reporters newsrooms are shrinking the value of a press story is not quite the same as it once was so how can we get more people and more impact for our clients when I was thinking about what I wanted to ultimately go into just to back it up for a minute I had these great internships I was in the same situation as Kate in the sense that many people I saw had job security as of their second semester I was naive in thinking that I could send out resumes in October and get attention of people and communications everybody came back and said come back to me in May when you're ready to graduate we don't hire more than a month out from when we need people in our office and I had this interesting mix of communications and French and for me at the time there was a real distinction between the type of work that I do now which now is the intersection of sort of impact and communications and media at the time if you wanted to go into media you wanted to go into communications you went into a more corporate job if you wanted to do something on the impact side it was really an NGO or a non-profit or you got a Fulbright scholarship or you went to the Peace Corps I was willing to figure out how do I bring these two worlds together and for a long time even in the early part of my career I actually they were sort of two distinctive worlds for me when I was getting ready to actually think about jobs come second semester one of the things that I did unabashedly was email call and meet with anybody who was tangentially related to communications and by the way communications is a really broad word that I wasn't even quite sure I understood what those positions were in the real world but anybody who was in event planning PR, journalism television it didn't matter if I actually didn't want to go into those specific fields I just knew that I needed to get on the radar of these people one of the things I'll say is I live in New York City now and it's a really competitive landscape but it's the best place to be if you want to be in media and communications and the way to sort of get the jobs that you want starts with someone putting their foot forward for you and saying here's a resume you need to take a look at because you're competing against thousands of other resumes so you ultimately have to go in and win the interview but you want someone who can be your advocate and that starts now that starts with meeting with people talking with people following up with people keeping on their radar even when you don't need something from them but just reminding them who you are what you're interested in hearing out what is that passion for you you know my first job was at a small PR agency in Manhattan I ended up getting the job because a friend that I went to high school with her brother worked at the office in DC and was able to put my resume forward for me I had three interviews got the job it was a small company 15 people I walked in the door and on day one they said here are your accounts good luck I had no idea what I was doing but I had to learn really quickly it was very exciting to work at such a small place because I had so much responsibility on day one and so much ownership over the types of work that I was doing and people really saw me and were paying attention to what I was doing I was there for about two and a half years ultimately a woman I worked with at that job went to another agency and brought me over I stayed there for five and a half years which is where I met my co-founder the two of us were managing our strategic communications team we were feeling like there was not a lot of room for growth the company we worked at though small had just been bought by a massive media company so we sort of saw that things were going to get very corporate we were probably going to have to sign a bunch of contracts that were going to keep that was going to keep us there or not allow us to work with competitive clients and so we started thinking what is the next step for us is it a lateral move to go work at another agency or is this the moment to really tap into the skills that we've developed the network that we've developed and go off and try this on our own and there were a series of things that sort of instigated that and fueled that one is that we were going through this very transitional time in our lives where we felt like now is the time to really bring together those two worlds that I mentioned which was the media and the impact and how can we make that our daily job and not just something that's a hobby in addition to the work that we do and two we had a boss who was kind of like a miniature version of Harvey Weinstein and so we thought you know what this doesn't work out it's better than staying here and making a dollar more for this man so we decided to take the plunge we launched our company four and a half years ago and we created a manifesto when we started which basically guides our principles and our values today and it helps us to vet the kind of clients we want to work with so we work with clients like the TED conference the TED talks we work with a sustainable sneaker brand that's made in France we have complete ownership over the types of clients that we can bring in because they have to be things that reflect our values and the things that are important to us and I think in the last year not to get into politics but what's happening in the national dialogue it's brought a lot more attention to the causes and the organizations and the people who care about these things and so in a weird way the silver lining for us is going to be more outspoken about the things they care about and the things they think are important and so we've been doing this for the last four and a half years but other people are starting to catch up and so it's been a really interesting time for us and I will say that I have a team of six people that work with me not one of them actually has a degree in PR or communications and this is all just to say that it actually doesn't matter what your major is in your liberal arts background to me I hire because it's not just what's on your resume you come to me at 22 years old everybody's resume kind of looks the same yes you've had different internships yes we've all had great college backgrounds and educations but I want to know who you are I want to know what you stand for and I want to know who you are outside of the work your work doesn't define you every day it's more than that they're English majors they're political science majors they were international studies majors but they all believe in what we're doing they are excellent writers they're great public speakers they have the tools and the skill set to do the job that I need them to do really well and it also brings different perspectives to what we're doing which I think is really important I would just leave you with a few pieces of advice now that I'm on the side of hiring people a few things that I tell the people when they come to me that I think are really important and we don't think about when we're first going out there and so anxious about just getting a job and wanting to get the job the job of our dreams for me when I graduated there were two things I wanted I wanted to live in New York and I wanted to work in media I didn't care how I got there I didn't really actually care what the job was because I knew it wasn't going to be my life long job I knew that I just needed the job to get there and then I'd figure it out afterwards so one of the things I always say to people who I talk to is don't worry about if that first job is not the job that you are the most passionate about it's not the perfect job as Kate mentioned most people are job hopping every two years now so you won't be there in two years but what you can do is use that experience to soak up everything you can possibly learn from it and take it to the next place the other thing to keep in mind is that when you step out of here regardless of how amazing your grades are how many activities you are involved in you're actually coming to the table with zero knowledge and I don't mean that to scare anybody but I just mean it to say that the playing field has been leveled it doesn't matter about your internships we all know internships are great opportunities to figure out what you do and don't want to do but you're not really developing true skill sets for the workplace so go in with an open mind go in being willing to learn adaptable, flexible come in with humility I've had a few people that I've met with and they come in thinking I already have done all these things and so you should want me and the reality is I'm sitting on the other side of the table saying why should I pay you this much because you haven't done anything yet so just remembering that we all have to start somewhere and we all did this my first job I made $30,000 a year I did anything that I could just to get in front of my boss just to get visibility 90% of my salary was going towards my rent it was not a job of glamour or luxury I was barely able to live the sort of sex in the city dream life that I had envisioned in New York it was nothing like that, I was eating at the corner deli but I worked really hard I stayed at my company for two and a half years and I continued to keep up with the people who I had made connections with over the years I got up with them, let them know what I was up to and I was able to move up really quickly and that's the nice thing about PR and communications is that even though it feels like you're starting so far behind some of your fellow student, fellow peers who are in the business school you can catch up really quickly if you are smart about how you do your career the third thing I would say is be open to working at the little guys and to the companies that perhaps don't have brand name recognition I think sometimes it's easy to get wooed by big companies because we know their names and we think that it means job security and sometimes it's hard to take the risk or the leap to work at a startup or to work at a company whose name we've never heard of before I will say the two jobs I had before I started my company I don't think anybody in this room would know the names of the companies but they prepared me like no other job ever could for the work that I do today and they allowed me to really do work from the start I wasn't pigeonholed as the new person who could only make press lists for the first year and then graduate to the second year and do one other task I think that there's something to be said for taking a risk on the little guys when you're young, you don't have a family, you're single you can do these things and I think that it definitely helps in the long run the last thing I'll say is remember to follow up with people there is something to be said for that because you'd be incredibly surprised how many times people do not follow up and remember to follow through and to keep in contact with your network so you start building your network now but even if you don't need them for something it's important to remind them that you exist it's important to reach out to them I had an intern two years ago who worked with me ultimately decided communications wasn't for him he now works at Google every six months I get an email from him unprompted just saying hello checking in, asking about our clients letting me know what he's up to and if anybody ever would have come to me and need someone in the career path that he's in he would be my first call because he comes back every time and it's not transactional he actually is being really strategic and smart about it because he's playing the long game and I think that's really important so I'm happy to answer any questions after this or afterwards I'm happy to give out my email I'm always happy to talk to people about the job search what it means to work in communications what sort of jobs are available in the field so I hope that you take me up on that Amen sister so it's been 25 years since I've been in this room I'm the Vieja on this panel the old lady because she wants to expand it so I am the psychology and art history major with the Masters in Psychology from Teachers College from Columbia and I did that in the middle of my career so what am I doing at this table how did I end up when you guys graduated I was hosting my show on CNBC and producing it so it gives you a little bit of context my recession I graduated in was 93 and that was a tough time so I did start out in the art business actually I started Christie's auction house making 24,000 a year which is a big commentary on the economy by the way and how that didn't grow for about 10, 15 years but through that you can read my bio but there's just so much there I've got advice coming out of my ears a lot of what you said but obviously my major was not what I ended up doing but what I did want to do is listen we all have our stories I came from an immigrant family where I was the first in my family to get a college education first female to graduate from high school I didn't have the option of going into media and communications in my house that just was not considered the place to go I couldn't be a writer or I couldn't be on TV or any of that I had to be a doctor, a lawyer or an MBA period so I started out here pre-met at Fairfield if you can imagine and once I switched my majors Kathy Schwab my dear Kathy Schwab who was my professor once I switched my majors very sad letters very sad letters about wonderful doctors succeeding in life and I didn't have a lot of that support but as I was going through I was finding out figuring out who I am and who I was going to be and I'm still doing that this many years later so you're going to be doing that many many years later I would say don't ever stop doing that ever continuing to figure yourself out and what you want to do but I went from Christie's Auction House you know I don't want to be in the art business I love art but I can't be in this business the limitations were there I didn't come from a certain family I didn't come from a family with money it was just going to be on the non-creative side or on the business side because I happen to have a business brain fine I go to Goldman for four months that ain't happening I'm like no I'm a writer these had placement firms I was like oh my god and I ended up getting an interview I wanted to be at Time Magazine that was a big dream of mine so one of the things growing up with families that were immigrants but who had fled revolutions is we had a very political household and a couple of things were the byproduct of that I was raised on news constantly raised on news I've been a news addict since I could read I read everything that passed through my hands and that's something that's a skill I never go away and it has served me tremendously well in life the other thing is that my mother wanted me to grow up without an accent so guess what I watched exclusively pretty much news and PBS that was it it was constant news, it was news in the morning it was the morning shows which I ended up being on unfortunately my mother passed away before she could see me on the Today Show for eight years but there I was but I remember growing up watching that then it was nightly news but I grew up with this around me as a constant and also business news my dad was in tech so here's the thing it all shapes you, everything you're exposed to right now everything is going to shape you you'll be sitting here, you'll be coming here 20 years from now and you'll be saying I remember this is how I grew up this is what I was interested in this is what I was passionate about and this is where I ended up so I ended up at Time Magazine Time Inc. owned a whole bunch of magazines openings at Time I was like well it's either Time or People because I love people, that'll be fun and she said the only openings at Money Magazine well I grew up with the Wall Street Journal my dad was into stocks, I wasn't into sports so I was like hey dad what's the stock I said I could do that I landed where I landed and this may happen to you and it really can sometimes pay off I ended up there excelled, ended up as an editor there and then the print business started dying I ended up at CNN Money for a while got very frustrated one of the things that I hope that you all as the females in this room, I hope you don't encounter this but it was incredibly difficult back in my day as a woman and a woman of color to get ahead anywhere and I was usually the only person in the room the only person on the mast head the only person on a floor sometimes who looked like me or was like me so that is something I hope you don't have to deal with so I got frustrated, left, got my masters came back I wanted my PhD but listen I was tired of being poor so I came I was like I'm done with this let me go back and make money doubled my salary when I got back I wasn't majoring in business journalism nothing but the simple fact that I got my graduate degree doubled my salary when I got back so keep that in mind that a lot of it is really about the accomplishments that you make not necessarily what you're studying and then Prince started dying so I wrote my first book half of us got laid off within a year I was terrified because all of a sudden I had a mortgage but in a year I ended up with my own TV show so I was going on TV to promote the book one of the things that Melody mentioned that is very very important it was through my network of friends who one of them had already done a book and she already promoted the book so she said you need to do this thing about I built a website back then authors did not have websites it was an anomaly nobody put money on that I barely had any money but I knew this was important and she was connected me with the first the first TV hit that I ever did those kept rolling in I just happened to be good at it but maybe all those years of watching TV that really paid off and there you go I ended up with my own show so then the recession hit CNBC ended up cutting a whole bunch of shows what I did was I built a business I built a consulting and speaking business off of my niche which was personal finance and that business doubled what I made on TV that takes a business head to so one of the things I would really say to all of you is the most important thing you can do I think in communications besides learning how this whole process is and learning how to communicate well is learning how the business works how it's changing how it's adapting and being able to adapt because when I go back and I look at all the people that were laid off with me at Money Magazine and see who has stayed in the business it's tiny it's really really hard so you need to be able to adapt with it stay ahead of it as much as you can and monetize it how you can and then what happened after that and then thankfully my personal situation I ended up in a good situation where I could go into what I really really really loved which is content and storytelling for women and women of color so here I am now five years after my personal finance advice business which all my advice columns and the magazines and all that oh yeah sorry I was also a faculty professor at NYU in the graduate school of finance and risk engineering which is where I really let my nerd brain go and it felt really really good so I was teaching the graduate school quantitative behavioral economics that's where a lot of my business came from that didn't pay but my speaking business paid and having that position really helped build my speaking business but that wasn't my passion none of this was my passion in the end I wanted to always get to being to do what I wanted to do from the start which was right and so a novel series later I am now doing a TV pilot with my agency I'm at UTA I'm also financing and investing in shorts one with an actress from Orange is New Black I have a Sirius XM show which piloted last week which looks like it's going to go in March so I'm hosting that that's the deep dive with Carmen Rita Wong so follow me at Sirius at Carmen Sense SCNSE all this to say and I'm on all these boards as well what can I say you're going to have questions I'll tell you this one of the you said so many things all of you said so many great things one of the things missing is I would love the biggest most helpful thing for me was finding all these groups outside of my work and friend groups so affiliate groups no matter what you're interested in whether you're person of color you have a political passion no matter what your group is maybe it's sports find these groups outside of your work and outside of your really close friendships you have the web now I didn't have these things so go out and use those and meet people face to face and develop these relationships I mean Melody made the point about this guy kind of playing the long game well the Sirius XM show came about because a woman who interviewed me 13 years ago is now VP there and we connected on Facebook and she got the job and within a day was like let's meet that's long game but I also she had a great impression we made great impressions on each other I helped her out when she was in between jobs she I was very busy I had my show and she was like oh can I can we just you know please never say pick your brain this is the best advice I can give you I swear because I can't tell you how many of us will shut you down and hit delete if I hear pick your brain no you cannot pick my brain if everyone picked my brain asked me to pick my brain I have no brain left but and it's a big one but what you can do is you can present yourself you can tell what you're interested in you can tell what you've accomplished you can ask for very specific advice very specific advice that I can answer in an email that this sounds great what about blank that I can do in two sentences then play that long game or and or offer up your services in some way one of the best pieces of advice I heard years ago was if you're going to present yourself make someone's life easier so you can say do you have a social do you have a social media manager do you have this do you have that fill a gap for somebody you'll be worth so much and back it up with really really really great work and I've seen so many long term relationships happen from that in jobs and so that would be in my advice for now thank you that's pretty fabulous what I'd like to do is open it up to you so we have time and just raise your hand stand up and talk very loudly we've got one what me so did you say do I have any men on my staff it's interesting I work with a freelancer so we're a team of six two of them are part time freelancers and one of them is a guy who I used to work with at my old agency and was recently laid off for no fault of his own and had stayed connected with me and so I'm doing what you talked about which is sort of helping to fill that gap right now and giving him a job because I trust him and I know him I didn't intentionally build a team of all women but sometimes it just happens that way why did you ask that question is that okay okay well I was going to say listen as a very strong feminist here there is I've encountered some of that recently especially in radio business you got to understand that it's because the businesses and all the businesses have been so male dominated there is nothing wrong with having all female especially if it's a small firm you can have men too but just as if there has always been male firms and no one ever said is there a woman here why isn't there any woman here it just happens I'm curious about your curious can I chime in with one thing so our group this stuff is all complicated it's not a black and white kind of situation but we try to run our business as a meritocracy the people who perform perform our writers make the compensation structure is sort of multifaceted but one component of it is the people who generate the most audience they help us pay our bills and they make more money than the people who don't generate very much audience that's the if you're a heavy contributor you get to share in our profitability about two-thirds of our top performers are women and I didn't go out I didn't go out honestly in some ways I almost do go out of my way to find women because they outperform men by a substantial margin nice job to the how many guys are in here we got probably about a handful so here's the thing it's to me at least it's not surprised I was not surprised at all to be the only guy on this panel and I'm not surprised that the women outnumber the men substantially because at least in my experience over the last few years the number of I mean this no no nonsense here at all the number of quality candidates that I get who are women it's at least a two to one ratio for for what it's worth and if I could just add to that communication specifically PR has a history of being very women dominated as a field and there's a feminist writer and freedman who wrote a piece for New York magazine a few years ago called the pink ghetto and it talks about why do we why do we sort of stereotype women in PR why do we refer to them as sort of less than because there are a lot of stereotypes that come along with this industry of sort of not being thoughtful and just constantly being aggressive and bombarding people and and she talks about this this history of women having worked for men in corporate positions and actually sort of being the women behind the men who are getting them out there who are writing their speeches who are getting them a visibility they want who are putting out all the fires so there is sort of a history of this and I think the piece is really worth reading I taught at NYU a couple summers ago and I made it required reading for my students next question anyone women starting out in college or starting out in the workplace god I have a lot so I work in PR too but the slight difference is I actually work in financial PR so it's probably the one random segment PR that has a lot of men in it which changes the dynamic a little bit but I work for a woman owned firm as a side note but I think coming in as a woman in any industry I think my piece of advice would be again I think everyone touched on it but finding non-transactional ways to build relationships will always serve you well right so not just calling up somebody just when you need something but staying in touch with people that you bump into along the way helping connect other people that you know at any level even as you're just getting out if you have a friend that's looking for a job in media and you bumped into someone who does media connect them because helping other people build connections to is incredibly important and gender neutral I would say one of the things I learned really quickly one of the things I did not learn very quickly but was important was fail fast because you're gonna you're gonna fail at some point and that's okay so fail fast so what I mean by that is when something doesn't go as planned or you screw something up learn quickly from it because oftentimes the way you recover or what you learn from that is is oftentimes even more important than your your highs at work and coming out into your first jobs there's gonna be a couple of those I think we've all had them probably a couple of those times you just you fail so fail fail fast I could just add on to that I would say be a woman who's an advocate for other women I think we all have strong mentors or you will have strong mentors at some point in your career so do you pay that forward to somebody else and then I would say don't be afraid to use your voice because there's going to be a time inevitably when you're in a room and it's going to be you might be the only woman you might be one of very few women in the room and sometimes it can feel intimidating and sometimes it can feel like you're getting shut down and as someone who used to work for someone who was misogynist and sexist in all of the things that you fear in the workplace I was able to get through that job because in a weird way I sort of instilled fear in him because he didn't know how to react to someone who stood up to him and so never be afraid to use your voice I just add to that never feel less than always feel just as good just as entitled just as worthy of being there my mother's greatest gift to me is I'm the oldest of five girls and I have an older brother and she essentially was like here you can do anything whereas where she grew up she couldn't but she was like you can do anything you have every right to be there just as much as anybody else the one thing I'll say to what Ben said it's fabulous to have a meritocracy that's not the norm it's not a meritocracy and that was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn because what my mother was trying to teach me was that it was a meritocracy and what I learned is it's not for the most part a lot of it's who you know how you know them and the biases that people in charge bring to the table and what do they think of you but don't let that stand in your way as a woman you're going to come up against these doors and these ceilings these glass ceilings all the ceilings, right go sideways, go around, go in between dig a hole, build your own door whatever you have to do to get it done but you have every right to be there so get yourself there can I have for one plug I'm not going to answer the question the same way these guys did because believe it or not I've never been a woman just starting out in this industry my shameless plug is we have a podcast it's called Ball Like a Girl a female journalist named Olivia Stacey who's based in Florida you may see her on TV sometimes any of your sports fans she does some reporting for ESPN CBS Sports among others so she has a podcast that you can download an Apple podcast leave a review please and it's just a conversation it's an hour long conversation once a week with a woman in sports it could be someone in sports media it could be Carmen you might want to come on we'd love to have you on any of you guys for that matter and it's just there's some interesting people our guest last week was Michelle Tafoya who's the sideline reporter on the NBC broadcast and the Super Bowl we've had a couple other really interesting people we had an episode with three members of the USA Women's Hockey team so it's an absolutely shameless plug it's just the one excuse I could get to throw that in there no that's wonderful I'm wondering Carmen would you be willing to say a little bit about why you were at Sundance Film Festival oh so fun yeah but Melly's been to Sundance too she's rep them so it's super cool I was at Sundance for a couple of reasons I was on a panel for the National Association of Latinos in Production it's called NALIP and with Latino magazine and what I'm trying to do and then I also hosted an event with Latino producers and actors and actresses and all sorts of people what I'm trying to do is really get representation on screen one of the things that people can say and I think a lot of women can say this like if you don't see it it's hard to be it if you don't see it and I remember when the Today Show brought Bryant Gumbel on my mother had been watching Good Morning America she switched it to The Today Show because he looked like our cousins so there's an element of that but I think to someone mentioning hearing all these voices I cannot explain to you how important it is to have so many different voices around you to see all sorts of people and all sorts of voices and even if you feel like well I'm just what kind of voice do I have how is my voice different it absolutely is books I mean libraries are filled with stories of men who played baseball growing up or who lost a dog or so we all have really great stories that are just as worthy of being told so we should have those stories told so that's one of the things that I'm supporting and the short films that I'm producing and working on so it's really fascinating thank you anybody else with a question for any yes we can't hear you that's a great question you know I don't typically like to think of it as like seeking out a specific mentor I think the people who have mentored me the most has been an evolution over time it's not someone that I went after saying I want you to be my mentor it's someone who I developed a relationship with for whatever reason and have stayed connected to over time and that could be former bosses former colleagues I will say despite some of the faults of the last company that I worked at one thing they were excellent at was at hiring people and so the team of people that I worked with there who were at all levels were really incredible and so many of us have gone on to start our own businesses to do our own things and we've all stayed connected and we kind of mentor each other so now it's really great because we all collaborate on projects so I'll help them with press for a project they might have me speak on a panel we're constantly sort of we've created this network and I don't know if it's the traditional sense of a mentor but we kind of mentor each other so sometimes it doesn't necessarily always have to be someone who's older than you I'm not sure that quite answered your question I don't think there's a silver bullet to finding a mentor and maybe other people have more specific answers to how they found theirs but I think it needs to be a natural fit someone who you feel comfortable with who you've started to develop that relationship with over time versus someone that you just go after to make your mentor I would say my mentors to my first mentors are here Professor Kathy Schwab and Professor Ron Davidson and it happened very naturally I don't even use the word mentor didn't come into play but what I would say is seek out people who you admire who see you see you for who you are and all the potential that you have and all the things that you could do because I didn't necessarily seek out Kathy and Ron but it was just a natural to your point a natural relationships and the same in my professional career these are people that just they got me and then they believed and they could see that I could do things so I would say that's the case what happens is that I get a lot of email inquiries or if I do speaking engagements around the country people say oh will you be my mentor I don't know you I don't know you so no I can't mentor you somebody who's really a mentor to you which now corporate uses the word sponsor they have to know you and so they can understand or get to know you or invest some time in you and get to know what you're capable of that's the best type of mentorship you can have and sometimes it takes a while but see who you have really good relationships with and then really you know enrich those and get them to get to know who you are so that they know what they can do for you and guide you and I would decide to that it doesn't necessarily have to be someone who's in the same industry as you in fact I think it's nice to have someone who has an active one real simple thing is just don't be shy and that includes by the way us here come up we'll be hanging around I do have to go watch Stay the Union at some point but everybody who went I mean you didn't have to come here I don't know if anybody is getting like extra credit or anything but presumably you all came here as volunteers to hear what we had to say so come up afterward and say hi I'd love to meet any of you guys and like I said I live across the street so if anybody ever wants to get together and and pick my brain I'd be more than happy to talk and in general whether it's a setting like this or whether it's a professional setting you know you don't want to be bombarding people all day and just you know being in their hair but I think as a somebody who's been a had a chance to be a manager in a couple different settings I don't know that I've ever been annoyed if a young reporter wanted to talk about something or wanted to run something by me you know again if it's 5 times a day yeah that's going to get a little annoying but show up you know show up at somebody's office ask somebody if they'll grab a cup of coffee with you and I think if you're willing to put yourself out there a little bit you might be surprised at how receptive a lot of hiring managers and more senior people are to be in that person for you or be one of the people for you the last piece that I kind of stumbled on to is you don't need to have one person or two people I'd struggle to even you guys are probably the same way I'd struggle to give you a clean list of who my mentors are because there's some people who probably mentored me and you know every aspect of my life and some who just gave me some really good advice once who maybe I met at an event like this or maybe I met at a conference somewhere or exchanged emails with so take the advice that you can get and don't be shy in seeking it out I think with that we can shift gears and why don't you come on up let's first give everybody a nice round of applause we thank them so much we thank our speakers for their time rearranging their personal lives to be with us tonight a lot of travel Carmen left she said a hard 8.30 for her taping tomorrow morning right but we have her we have Melody we have Ben and we have Kate so come on up don't be shy and have a nice conversation with them thank you all for coming thank you Kathy