By Skylar Bates
The question on the minds of graduating college students is near universal: What’s next?
At this year’s talk in the Professional Writing Minor Graduate Speaker Series, UC Santa Barbara alumna Alivia Birdwell highlighted possible next steps for graduating seniors in the Professional Writing Minor and said her undergraduate internship experience charted a path toward a career in marketing.
In the talk, hosted over Zoom by the UCSB Writing Program, Birdwell explained how the writing minor unexpectedly provided an avenue to her profession and she recounted her subsequent 10 years of marketing experience after graduating UCSB with a Bachelor of Arts in Global Studies in 2007.
“My first job out of college was through the internship with the Writing Minor program,” Birdwell said. She interned for Direct Relief, an international non-profit based in Santa Barbara. “I helped initially with technical writing. It's really trying to make complex subject matters into something that's more simple and clean.”
In a recent Zoom meeting, hosted by the UCSB Writing Program, UC Santa Barbara alumna Alivia Birdwell discussed her experience working in the marketing department of Teva shoes, a Deckers Brand.
Through her extensive background in writing, Birdwell encountered new opportunities at her internship with Direct Relief. After volunteering to do blog posts for their United States programs Birdwell’s passions became clear.
“What I came to realize is how much I love brand storytelling. Which is really: How do you get your brand’s message and purpose out there in a way that feels really relatable and effective?” Birdwell said.
She described her later experiences working with corporations like Ancestry® and Deckers Brands, a shoe and clothing outlet.
“I started working at Deckers initially for a smaller brand called Mozo Footwear,” Birdwell said. “I wrote the social copy, I wrote a website copy, I helped assemble brochures. Because I had that experience with writing and had that exposure during the business communication track, I was able to more easily step in and fill out these different needs.”
Today, Birdwell is the Director of Integrated Marketing at Chime, a financial technology company founded in San Francisco.
“Our mission is about delivering peace of mind to consumers and making banking services really easy and helpful,” Birdwell said. She believes it’s important to find a job in a corporation with a mission that she can align with. “That gets me more excited about work. That gets me more excited about telling their brand stories and marketing their products.”
Birdwell urged future grads to get out of their comfort zones. “Be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” she said. “You’re going to be stretched in different ways and you’re often uncomfortable because you’re doing something new or maybe you have a new task that you’ve never done before. But that’s okay and that’s where you’re going to stretch and grow.”
Birdwell ended her talk with one final piece of advice for current and graduating writers in the Professional Writing Minor.
“Let your creative ideas lead. Don't be afraid to put your best ideas out there,” Birdwell said. “The more you focus on putting ideas into action, the better you are at getting them stronger and getting collective buy-in, and also being able to build really impactful narratives.”
Skylar Bates is a third-year Political Science major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this article for her Digital Journalism class.