From chemistry to content marketing.
The one story I always get asked to explain at networking events!
I have a chemistry degree yet I've spent eight years in content and marketing. Here's what I learned:
For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be a vet.
But at sixteen, sitting in a sixth-form prep club for vets and medics, I was told there wasn't a cat in hell's chance that I could compete with the kids who'd been primed for it their whole lives. They had years of farm placements, abattoir visits, time in vet clinics... I had owned three gerbils and done two weeks of work experience at fifteen. So, whilst I was gutted, I did what any teenager would do and dramatically decided I would study chemistry, work in a lab and definitely cure cancer.
It was of course the only next logical step. And by far the hardest thing I have ever put myself through.
I say that having since been through a renovation in a global pandemic, built an ecommerce platform from scratch, taken an old-school and very stubborn team through adopting a new software, and having taught myself SEO from YouTube tutorials because the role-essential training I was promised never arrived.
Feeling stupid is a good start
The thing they never tell you as a student is that the environment in which you have to learn intensively for 8 hours a day, cram an impossible amount of information into your brain, probably do it all with a hangover multiple days a week and generally learn to be an adult, actually doesn't exist anywhere else in your life. It’s a miracle anyone makes it through without mental health issues and unsurprising that most don’t.
On top of the usual experience, I had chosen a subject I genuinely found a complete mind-boggle on most days. I always felt like the most stupid person in the room and I was absolutely terrible in the lab (though not as bad as the guy who set his whole experiment on fire - that's a story for another day). Oh - I was also allergic to the lab gloves.
I know at this point I’m just slating my own experience. Don’t get me wrong, I feel lucky to have gone to uni, made the friends I did, and been able to study something for four years without worrying about really anything else. It is a massive privilege.
So what did I actually get out of it?
Well, aside from a MChem certificate in a drawer somewhere, it taught me that I love learning in context. I would've actually been a great apprentice somewhere, looking back. I like learning when there feels like there's a point to it; an end product I can look at and see the theory in practice. I also learnt working in a lab was not what I was meant for, at all. And after a placement in corporate comms between my third and fourth year, and my favourite part of the degree being writing my two theses, I made the decision that I wanted to write.
Cue the accidental marketing career
When I started my first proper job in the communications team at a tech company, the imposter syndrome hit almost immediately. I didn't have a marketing degree, I hadn't studied English since my GCSEs, and I was surrounded by people who knew instinctively how to write persuasively, how to get a website ranking, how to convince someone to make a multi-thousand pound purchase.
I felt out of my depth in a completely new way.
But this time, being out of my depth made me want to try harder rather than shut down. I was done with feeling stupid. Partly because somewhere in the back of my mind I kept thinking, maybe arrogantly, that this can’t be as hard as chemistry.
The imposter syndrome shifted properly about a year in, when I was promoted to ‘technical writer’. I became the person who sat with the tech teams before any campaign started — writing the technical guides for sellers, the introductory guides for customers, understanding the products not just well enough to market them but well enough to explain exactly why they were worth marketing. Nobody else in the team was doing that, and not because they couldn't, but because most of them hadn't learned to just ask questions regardless of how silly you might feel. My degree had made me allergic to pretending I understood something I didn't. Which is quite a useful quality when you're trying to understand complex technical products with, as it turns out, very lovely techies who are happy to dive deep and teach you a little about their world.
I realise looking back now that I'd always been drawn to that space between technical and non-technical — the translation layer. I just hadn't had a word for it.
I’d also like to note that, six months in, the CEO told me our website and SEO manager was leaving and he wanted me to learn her role. The training he promised never materialised, so I went on YouTube, taught myself what SEO actually was, figured out the tools, played around in the back-end of the website builder, picked up basic HTML, and eventually built whole new pages, whitepaper landing pages and email automations, all through trial and error. My attitude was genuinely: what's the worst that happens? They hire someone else? I did that role on top of my comms/technical writer role until the day I left the company!
Embracing the error amidst the trial
Whilst I love trial and error, and have built an entire career around it, I do sometimes have an issue with the error part.
For a long time I regretted not doing a different degree because I never used it.
I’ve often thought about how I could have taken a gap year to get myself up to speed for the experience that I maybe would’ve been able to get into vet school with. But c’est la vie.
It’s worth mentioning that this blog only gets us to mid-2020, around 2 years into my career. The last six have involved even more of both trial and error!
So what can I leave you with today?
Well, for a start having a degree in an awful lot of jobs doesn’t actually matter and having the wrong one doesn’t make you less qualified to apply for one, if you really want it.
In my experience, I’ve gotten into interviews because people are interested in me having the wrong one - it’s a weird flip. And in some ways I’d argue having the wrong degree makes you harder to replicate as a candidate and then as an employee. Because you walk in without the assumptions, without the inherited way of doing things, without the sense that you already know how this industry worked. You have to figure it out properly, which means you actually understand it rather than just performing it.
And on uni: the experience of surviving something genuinely hard and coming out the other side thinking “right, what else can I do” has followed me into every room since. I'm not even in marketing anymore, as it happens. My career has taken another turn, into content management and AI systems and something that looks increasingly like building a small empire, and I didn't plan any of it. I never really plan it. I just find the most interesting thread in whatever role I'm in and pull on it until something new appears.
My degree didn't prepare me for any of this specifically. But at the same time, it prepared me for all of it.
Thanks for reading!
This blog is funnily enough another trial and error thing for me. I’ve always loved writing but never about myself so I’m trying something new. If this resonates please do pop me a message on social media or my contact form - it’s always nice to hear from another human who has connected with my work in some way!
All the best, Charlotte