Overwhelming as college is for a student to decide on their degree, major, internship, full-time application, one thing I knew for sure is my passion for Marketing, which led to my Marketing major. Having been also confident in Math and Accounting classes and curious about what this knowledge can do for me, I decided to pursue a 2nd major in Finance and achieved my undergraduate degree with a 3.9 GPA from University of Houston.

Moving from Houston to Indianapolis after accepting my first full-time offer, I found myself in a new city learning a new job, a Financial Services Representative and Stockbroker at Charles Schwab. I quickly obtained my investment licenses (7 and 66) that taught me about different investment products, derivatives as well as regulations. However, the most important skills I learned from this job are: communication and customer service. Spending 11 hours/day on the phone talking to 50 customers, I learned how to use my tone and words to influence someone who doesn’t see me, how to de-escalate an angry, nervous customer and how to make them trust me to choose Charles Schwab. Despite all the experiences and success I saw in this first job, my Inspiration and fulfillment wasn’t there, and I knew this wasn’t for me.

After accepting a new job offer, I found myself in Houston again working as a Business Development Analyst for Shell Aviation. This is where I acquired my most unexpected skill: deliver value without a job manual. Coming from an extremely structured job as a Financial Services Rep, I now landed in a brand-new role created with the goal of growing Shell Aviation’s market, but no instructions. In addition, my Line Manager position was also vacant. Fast forward to 18 months later, I now worked with sales on new customer bids, with Supply on demand forecast accuracy, with Marketing on customer events and trade shows, and finally, created a Commercialization Matrix that assessed and ranked the success potential for Shell Aviation in 100 countries. On my own, I also produced the detailed SWOT analysis and proposal to establish new Shell Aviation business in 5 countries. I defined my own role and made everyone aware of my determination to learn and contribute.

As part of my Graduate Rotation at Shell, I needed to rotate to a new role in a different business to continue my professional development. My Curiosity in Supply Chain and lack of experience in this function led me to believe that I needed to try it next for long-term career consideration. Despite my effort to enter this function, I got placed, once again, in a brand-new role as a Marketing Analyst in the Shell Lubricants Marketing organization. The goal was to support Branding and Marketing Activation activities of Pennzoil, Quaker State and Shell Rotella brand, but without any job instruction. So, I did what I do best: reaching out to people, asking them to let me help, convincing them to teach me how to do their job and eventually, defining my own role. One of my biggest achievements from this job was finding my long-term career passion in Marketing. Within 18 months, I launched my first digital media campaign, refreshed the rating and review database for all 3 brands, organized racing and industry events, led a portfolio refresh project and finally, owned the Marketing Mix Modeling that provided the first-ever ROI tracking for Lubricants Media and Field activities. This project gave me the credibility to also be entrusted with defining the post-investment review KPI for Shell Lubricants Marketing.

Throughout my career, I knew that I wanted to be customer-facing due to my time in the Sales program at University of Houston. Upon leveraging my network and exploring different opportunities, I got the Partner Marketing Manager role in Shell Lubricants. Learning a new job during COVID-lockdown wasn’t ideal, but I took advantage of this situation knowing that, during business uncertainty, I would get to define my role once again. When my sales partners expected me to be a support person whose role is assistance, I showed them that I was an equal partner who also owned the customer relationships. Despite being new, I was the Marketing, Brand and Product expert that they needed to achieve our business goal. Testing and leveraging every single marketing strategy and tactic I knew, from digital campaigns, field marketing events, crafting GTM strategy for new products to running promotions, contests and partner incentives while optimizing my budget ROI, I proved to my sales partners, my boss and the Executives that I owned my customer relationships, my channel performance and product performance as if it was my own business.

Just as Curiosity and Inspiration have led me through my career choices, they led me to the decision to step out of my comfort zone and find the next challenge in a new company, a new industry and a new place. Following my Inspiration for Marketing, I’m looking for the next Marketing role in Product and Partner Marketing. I am confident that Shell has taught me how to navigate my career without a manual in a complex organization, in which collaboration with stakeholders is crucial to anyone’s success. This transferrable skill, along with my Curiosity to learn and Inspiration to perform will help me succeed in any role that I’m passionate about. This is also the value I will offer to my future company: deliver result in the face of uncertainty.