My boss told me early on to be a sponge. I wrote it down. I didn’t fully understand what it meant until I was in it. 

I graduated with a marketing degree and a genuine belief that I knew how marketing worked. I was right about some of it. The agency side is correcting the rest, fast. And honestly, that correction was needed. 

Starting on the Inside 

My internship at Nex-Tech Creative started on the internal marketing team, not the agency side. I was creating short-form video content for the company itself while sitting in the same office as account executives managing campaigns for ISPs and broadband providers across the country. 

What that proximity does to you is hard to replicate in a classroom. You don’t just hear about the work; you hear how and why decisions are made. The client pivots, the creative rebuilds, the moments where a strategy shifts because the client’s needs change overnight. You absorb the decision-making framework before you ever have a seat at the table. 

The first month felt a little like borrowing someone else’s workspace. I was chatting with people, learning the rhythm of the office, listening to what the agency side looked like, but almost nobody around me was working on the same things I was. That could have felt isolating. Instead, it made me pay attention. 

And what I observed made me want to be more involved. Because from the beginning, Nex-Tech didn’t treat my ideas like intern ideas. They pushed me to pitch things, to back up my thinking, to chase down the ideas I believed in. If a concept was good and I could make the case for it, it would get heard. That kind of environment doesn’t happen everywhere, and I recognized it early enough to take advantage of it. 

When the Opportunity Came 

Eventually a role opened on the agency side. I went after it, and I was so nervous. 

The second round of the interview process included a marketing challenge. I had to develop a full campaign concept for a fiber overbuild in a competitive market, build out a competitive positioning strategy, research every provider in the area, and then walk a panel of people through my thinking in under twenty minutes. I treated it like a real client pitch. I built out slides with a ninety-day launch timeline, five success metrics, and a backup slide set for Q&A. I reached out to a professor I trusted and asked him to tear the whole thing apart before I walked into the room. I wanted to be challenged by someone I respected before the real thing. 

Along the way, I got feedback from people inside the company who had every reason to just be polite but chose to be genuinely invested instead. They sent me reading lists. They shared feedback the same day as the interview. They told me to reach out if I had questions and they meant it. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that this is what it looks like when an agency actually builds people, not just when they’re on staff, but before they’ve technically earned it. That’s not standard. That’s a culture that makes a choice. 

Then I walked into the second round and my nerves showed up first. 

Somewhere between the door and the title slide I lost my confidence. I trusted the product I had created, just not myself. I knew the material, but my brain went quiet in the worst possible way. Not the useful kind of quiet where you slow down and think. The kind where you can feel yourself losing the thread in real time and you’re not sure how to get it back. 

My interviewer saw it happening and did something I won’t forget. She stopped the whole thing, told me to take a breath, and let me walk down the hall to reset. Just like that. No commentary, no pressure, no making it a bigger moment than it needed to be. She just gave me a window. 

The other interviewer told me to do a superhero pose before I started again. Hands on hips, chin up, stand in it for a second. I stood in an empty hallway and did exactly that. And then I went back in. 

Here is the part that actually helped: when I pulled up my screen to present, I just started talking to my slides, to my own preparation, to the work I had put in over the previous two weeks. Something about that unlocked something. I stopped performing and started presenting. I delivered every slide. I talked about competitive positioning in a crowded broadband market with people who had decades of experience in exactly that space. 

They offered me the role after that round. 

I share all of that not because the stumble is the point. I share it because what happened around the stumble is. A team that stops the clock for you when you’re falling apart, that gives you a hallway, and a superhero pose and sends you back in; that is a culture telling you something about itself. I had not earned that yet. I was still a candidate. And they showed up for me anyway. 

What School Didn’t Teach Me About Presenting 

I thought I was a solid presenter coming out of college. I had done the coursework, taken the classes, and stood in front of enough classrooms to feel like I had it handled. Presentation skills, check. 

Then I did it for real and realized those two things are not the same. 

In school, the stakes are manufactured. Your professor assigns a rubric. Your classmates are half paying attention. The worst outcome is a grade you can recover from. You practice presenting, but you practice it in an environment where almost nothing is actually on the line, which means you are not really practicing the part that matters most: managing yourself when the pressure is real and the people across the table have opinions that count. 

The first time I co-presented at a professional conference, I was alongside a colleague with sixteen years of experience. I had written my notes into the presenter’s view on every slide. I knew the material. I had rehearsed it. And then we got into the room, and I learned that knowing something and being able to deliver it under pressure in front of a real audience are two completely different skills that require completely different kinds of practice. That presentation went well. But I walked away knowing I had leaned heavily on those notes and that I needed to build something more durable than a script I could read when I got scared. 

A few months later I was part of a panel at a regional industry conference, and my presenter notes weren’t on the slides. I went blank again and a coworker had to prompt me to get me going. I knew the material, but small things threw me off. It’s how you start again that builds confidence and character for next time. Another instance where they could have let me drown but decided to help instead. And that one showed me exactly where the gap still was. 

What I know now that I didn’t know in school is that the presenting is not about the slides. The slides are the map. The presenting is the navigation, the ability to stay oriented when something shifts, to recover when you lose your place, to keep the thread of the idea alive even when your nerves are making noise. That is not something you can learn by building a PowerPoint and reciting it in a classroom. It is something you learn by doing it when it costs you something. 

I also know now that confidence in a room is not a personality trait. It is a practice. Every client meeting I sit in on, every time I walk someone through a campaign update, every time I have to explain a strategic decision to someone who is skeptical, that is a rep. And reps compound. The version of me that walked out of that interview and finished the presentation is not the same version that is writing this a few months later. Something shifted. I don’t think that shift would have happened had everything gone smoothly. 

I still have a long way to go. I say more filler words than I should. I sometimes talk faster than I mean to when the energy in the room changes. I am still learning how to read an audience in real time and adjust on the fly. But I am learning it in real situations with real stakes, which is the only way any of it actually sticks. 

School taught me the framework. The agency is teaching me the thing underneath it. 

What the Job Actually Looks Like 

The biggest shift between the internship and the full-time role wasn’t the title. It was the trust, and how fast it came. 

I work across four account executives now, supporting each of them on different client accounts and sitting in on at least two clients per AE. I have three of my own, and I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t be able to run them without my colleague who handles the digital side. That collaboration isn’t a gap in my skillset. It’s how good agency work actually functions. You know what you know, you know what you don’t, and you build around the right people. 

I say yes to almost everything I’m asked to help with across accounts, and I’m learning when not to.  

I’m also writing campaign copy for AEs that they review before it goes to the client. That check isn’t a limitation. It’s where I learn the most. Seeing what gets changed, and understanding why, is a better education than any case study I was handed in school. 

My notes from early training have a line I keep coming back to: “What hurts AEs the most is not having confidence. Confidence is key. Assertiveness is key.” I wrote that down because I recognized immediately that I was going to have to work for it. It wasn’t something I graduated with. It’s something I’m building through reps, and sometimes through the moments that don’t go the way you planned. 

What I’d Say to Someone Just Starting Out 

You are going to know less than you think you do coming out of school. That’s not a failure of your education. It’s just the gap between theory and work, and everyone who has ever started a career has stood in that gap. 

Pay attention to what’s happening around you, even when it’s not your project yet. Pitch the idea, but only if you can back it up. Take the accounts they offer you before you feel ready. Let your work get checked and understand that someone taking the time to do that is how you actually get better. Ask questions even if you’ve asked them five times before. 

The agency side teaches you fast if you let it. And the people around you, if you find the right place, will have your back while you figure it out. That part isn’t guaranteed. But when you find it, you’ll know.