For Sonam Nylosang, the marketing field is exactly where she plans to set standards for fellow marketers to come. She shares her inspiration, her triumphs and her insight on how to get ahead as a marketing student.
I want to pursue a career in marketing because it’s a very dynamic field. There are so many different jobs within marketing to explore. You can focus on social media, public relations, brand development, product management, SEO, market research, copywriting, and so much more. It’s not a boring job where you do the same thing every day. It’s exciting and fast-paced.
What I love about it is that you’re constantly learning and developing new skills within the industry. Especially now with rapidly shifting trends and innovation in technology, there is so much room for growth within the industry. I want to change the way we interact with consumers by exploring and leveraging new platforms, new technologies like virtual reality, holograms, and other future innovations.
As a student, one of the biggest challenges I face when applying for an entry-level job is having work experience. I’ve come across countless job postings that say, “This position requires a minimum of 3 years experience in a relevant role”. I find this expectation, especially for entry-level jobs, extremely unrealistic. You can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job.
Unpaid internships are often an option and a great starting point for students, but they are not a sustainable form of gaining experience long-term. So many students are having to juggle full-time course loads with part-time jobs to pay for school and living expenses. Making them take part in 3 years of volunteer/unpaid work on top of that just to be considered for an entry-level position is impractical.
My proudest achievement has been the work I've done as Vice President at the Digital Enterprise Management Association at the University of Toronto Mississauga. With my team we successfully organized and executed over 12 individual and collaborative events throughout the school year that contributed to the personal and professional development of UTM students. Through our work, we managed to build strong relationships with external partners such as Deloitte, Career Edge, Futurpreneur Canada, and CPA Ontario that our students will continue to gain value from in future years.
Out of all the events we've hosted I am most proud of our annual year-end networking event, The Young Entrepreneurs Conference. This event brought industry professionals and students from across Canada together under one roof to connect and share their passion for entrepreneurship, marketing, technology, and innovation. The conference featured keynote speeches from industry leaders, and entrepreneurs Q&A panel, a case competition, and open networking. This event truly embodied our goal of creating opportunities and facilitating student growth. To see the Young Entrepreneurs Conference come to life after months of planning and late-night meetings was an extremely proud moment for my team and me. To wrap up our year, The DEM Association was presented the Excellence Club of the Year and Leadership awards from the University of Toronto Mississauga Student Union for our hard work, dedication and consistent contribution to the UTM student community.
My biggest inspirations would be my grandparents. My grandparents are Tibetan refugees. To me, they are the embodiment of hard work and resilience. They have managed to overcome every obstacle that came their way. As children, they survived a trek through the Himalayan mountains when escaping Tibet, they’ve slept in the snow and on the streets, they were separated from their families and forced to find their way in foreign lands, they learned Hindi to survive and work in India, they immigrated to Canada with nothing but a 2-year-old baby, they learned English, worked 2-3 jobs at a time, and built the foundation that our family rests on today.
Despite all their hardships and misfortune, they are the most humble, kind-hearted, generous, supportive, and compassionate people I know. They’ve worked their entire lives to give my mom, brother, and me the opportunities they never had as kids. They are my biggest inspiration to do good and become something. Everything I do is to make them proud and show them that all of their hard work and sacrifice meant something.
My dream job is to work as a marketing director for 88 Rising. They are a young and multifaceted management, record label, video production, and marketing company that’s really taking the music industry by storm. Their goal is to represent Asian and other immigrant artists, which is something I really admire. Growing up in Canada, I never saw Asians/Asian-Americans represented in the mainstream music industry. Now with online platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify, it’s becoming easier for people to explore and discover music from artists anywhere. To work with a company that supports and represents artists from diverse backgrounds in the western music industry is something I would love to be a part of. The thought of working with artists I respect and admire, while also applying my knowledge and skills in marketing to promote their work just seems like perfect harmony to me.
