 I always get a kick out of on the first day of class I introduced myself as hey I'm Mark State and I'm a professor of marketing. I was a Southern United States history major so I was a liberal arts major in college and a lot of times the students are look at me like well how did you get a job with that and then I say well it's easy I learned how to read I learned how to write and then I was able to sort of turn that into a marketing career before I got my PhD and so but a lot of students particularly business students are first-generation students and I have a lot of respect for those students my father was a first-generation college student and he did his undergraduate major in business so I you know I think about my father a lot when I when I work with these students and I understand one of the issues with first-generation students in particular is a fear that they lack the cultural capital to get into the into the workforce and so I try and create a comfort level to acquire that capital and I also try to help them acquire that capital on their own not just through the blogs but specifically through the certifications that I that I have and I've had multiple multiple students particularly first-generation students say that they've gotten these jobs that they never expected to get before they took my class and it was the certifications that really gave them this capital that allowed a firm to say you know I want to hire her and so that has been a really really gratifying part of the way that the class works is that again similar to the blog I I want the work that the students do to reflect on themselves outside of Western outside of the classroom so that someone can see oh oh this person knows Google ads oh this person knows Google analytics okay cool that's something I don't have to teach this person if I were to hire him they already know it and so that so you know it doesn't matter who their parents are it's who they are and now they have this cultural capital within the digital marketing sphere that is really really valuable issues of representation are really important to me and so I really I try to be strategic about who I ask to do the hangouts because I want to make sure that every student in the class sees someone who reminds him or herself about him or herself at some point during the quarter and so that's really great because there's you know they got on they're not got enough professors like me but then the other thing that's been really great is the students when they graduate they'll come up to me and they'll say you know what mark I gotta say one of my dreams is to one day get an email from you about doing a hangout I'm here to talk about how the Google Hangouts that happen in Mark's digital marketing class actually helped me as a marketer as well as an MBA student so when I was in my undergraduate degree in the digital marketing course I heard about this Google Hangout thing that he did that pretty much brought in industry professionals within the marketing sphere to come and talk about the topics we were actually discussing in class on it on a business perspective which gave me kind of this insight about what was going on in the industry that you would not hear from just talking to a teacher reading a book so specifically throughout the entire time it was really cool seeing the people come in and kind of talk to us via Google Hangouts about their lives and it kind of gave me an incentive in the future to be that marketer that mark calls on in the future to be in those Hangouts because it just seems so highly coveted it looked really cool and it looked like he was very proud of where his students had ended up in the future and specifically within one period of time I found that we were learning about analytics via Google Analytics and there was a person who worked at Nike his name is Brian and I reached out to him just after he gave his presentation about pretty much just business analytics in general especially at Nike and asking for some help about the application process and he has guided me a hundred percent through the process giving me insight about recruiters and understanding kind of of how Nike corporate works and in general that has helped me really decide that my career is going to go in an analytical marketing direction and so it creates this community I used to actually say that I used to have different hashtags for each quarter but then I kind of lost track of which quarter I was in so so now there's just the hashtag www digimark and and you can see the students the former students following that hashtag to see what the current students are and it just creates this community beyond the classroom that I think is really great