Hi, I'm Working Girl One and I'm a Marketing Assistant

I'm not quite a marketing assistant yet, but I'm going to be soon.

Recently, our current marketing assistant gave her two weeks notice and recommended me for the job. For some time, I'd been contemplating sales versus marketing. I think I was almost trying to convince myself to like sales because it's so lucrative, but marketing is just more fun (at least for me). I can plan events, create promotions and gift baskets, and I find that very enjoyable.

When Facebook Friend Boss left and I began doing her job, I started to look at what I was doing everyday more analytically. What I found out: my heart is not in sales. When the marketing assistant told me her news, I started jumping up and down (figuratively not literally). This told me something, told me that right now my heart is in marketing.

I spoke to the associate publisher of marketing, who I had interned for during the summer of '06, and she was thrilled that I was interested. I was basically told that if I want the job, it was mine.

It was hush hush for a while and I couldn't tell my current bosses (awkward!), but last week I was officially offered the job. This means I'm going to be an assistant for a little longer than I thought I'd be but the offered me some monetary incentive, the possibility of a promotion to coordinator after six months, and a sweet business trip to South Africa.

Chicken Soup Boss thinks I'll end up in sales, she thinks I have the personality for it. I think she's wrong.

Working Girl Two: The Marketing Assistant

This working girl has been reading, writing and fascinated with anything that involves literature for as long as she can remember and that’s where my working story begins. Any family dinner that involves heaping helpings of nostalgia, my father loves to bring up how easily entertained I was as a baby – my parents would throw a pile of books in my crib and I would sit, drool and read until noon. My fascination for books and imaginary worlds led me to write my own literature. To this day, my dream is to be an author, write the next great American novel or at the very least some really great chick lit.

I am the daughter of an over-achieving working mother who could make a steak dinner, help with math homework, plan a sit-down charity event, and write and edit her own freelance articles within twenty minutes if you asked her. With Super Mom as a role model, I also veered down the path of an over-achiever. I played two school sports, participated in clubs to lead the school, save the school, clubs that sang about the school, and of course a club to write about the school. Let’s just say I loved working for my school.

I grew up in small suburban town on the North Shore in Illinois - the land of Lincoln and deep dish pizza. Even in high school, I figured Chicago was small apples compared to the Big Apple – that if I wanted to be something big I would need to make the big move. College seemed like my chance so I flew on over to Connecticut - land of Paul Newman and Stepford wives. My college was small and safely tucked in the suburbs just an hour train ride from the City That Never Sleeps, The Capital of the World, Empire City, well, you get the idea.

In college, I took a small break in working my hardest to bask in the newness of my scholastic freedom that included a casual beer on a Wednesday night, eating junk food at one in the morning and watching TV while doing my homework. I looked into joining clubs, did my fair share of school loving (geeky side note: I was a tour guide), but didn’t get overly involved. But when junior year rolled around, I took off my beer-colored glasses and stepped up my game.

The summer before my senior year I got an internship in New York City at a small e-zine known for its dedication to luxury. The stories from my time there, however, could fill a book. In this case, the devil didn’t wear Prada, she wore vintage and sent me on one too many ridiculous missions. My stories about ‘crazy lady’ are to be continued. I had another internship in college, worked as an editor at the school newspaper, and all the while dreamed of being my own boss someday and in between dreams and real life, co-spirited a magazine idea with my good friend Working Girl One and voila “Working Girl” was born.

However, a blog does not rake in the funds and neither do dreams unfortunately. Because of my lack of funds and my desire to stay in New York, I took a job as a Marketing Coordinator at a website/magazine. Job description: assistant to COO with the promise to move up in the world in under a year. Reality: assistant to COO, CEO, President, and Marketing Manager with lunch breaks spent at desk, and promise to move to editorial dwindling each day. Those are my current working girl trials – sticking out the first job blues of doing grunt work: fetching lunch, answering phones, and utilizing my editing skills for e-mails to schedule meetings with other CEO’s and COO’s of the world.

Hi, I'm Working Girl One and I'm a Sales Assistant.

("Hi, Working Girl One").

I don't know how I got here. But I did. So, Let's go back, back to the beginning.

At career day in preschool, while my friends were in fire fighter and nurse outfits, I wore my Care Bear pajamas. I wanted to be Funshine Bear when I grew up. Thankfully, that phase didn't last long.

Ten years later, I decided to take a different path. Childcare. I was a mother's helper, a babysitter, a nanny. I did it all and I'd do it all over again. But my adventures in babysitting are for another time, another blog.

So how did I become a Sales Assistant?

I guess it started the summer Working Girl Two and I were tour guides for our University. Yeah, we were pretty cool. That summer we came up with an idea for a magazine, something we could do on our own, work for ourselves, be our own bosses.

We started working for the school newspaper. We just keep getting cooler here at Working Girl, and I devoted my entire spring semester to finding the perfect summer internship at a magazine. After writing more cover letters than I can count and sending my CosmoGirl! cover letter to TeenPeople (a big Working Girl no-no), I scored a phone interview at a new Hearst magazine and a real-life interview at one of the country's best selling magazines. I came close to getting both, at least that's what they told me. Both of those opportunities were editorial internships and when nothing was working out for the summer and I had already paid to live at NYU for the summer, I took up my uncle's offer of working at the financial business company where he worked.

Out of nowhere, well not really nowhere but we'll save that for a blog post about taking every internship/job lead you get, I got a marketing internship at one of the leading women's lifestyle magazines and loved it. I loved the brainstorming, the creating, the events, the planning. As much as I loved it, I felt I still had to try editorial and I did. During my senior year, I interned at one of the magazines I had previously interviewed for. I didn't enjoy that editorial experience but I still enjoyed writing and editing for the school newspaper.

My internship experience and experience at the paper only made me more confused about what I wanted to do with my life. Upon graduation, I was determined to have a job lined up. Again, I devoted a great deal of my time to more and more cover letters. I applied for marketing positions, editorial positions, sales positions, media buying positions, everything.

One morning, again almost out of nowhere, about two weeks before graduation, I received an e-mail from a coworker from my summer internship. She said they needed a sales assistant and I'd be perfect for it. It all worked out and here I am, sending issues to advertisers, answering phones, filling out proposals, and trying to figure out if I like it enough to make it my career.