First Job Experiences!!

Like many in this office, this is my first job and one thing that most first-timers like me would have realized is that no matter how good a student you were, working life throws boomerangs that no textbook really warns you about.

I caught one such boomerang just a few days ago. This incident shook my feeling of security that all marketing events involve more or less the same elements. And, as it is for most of us, all I wanted to do that day was to finish the work assigned to me for the day and leave. If life was that simple, I would not have written this (besides I was also threatened into submitting an entry for our beloved blog).

As the launch of our book “Foreign Aid for Indian NGO’s” is coming up and we learnt from our Top secret Marketing News Source that a conference on child labor was being held at IIC and a lot of NGOs were attending it. Shafina and I, like typical marketing hounds, sniffed an opportunity to invite those NGOs too. This being a simple and straight forward task, I landed at IIC with a few invitations. Boomerang thrown.

However when I went there and spoke to the organizer, Ms. Mala, I realized that the event was much bigger that we had anticipated. And there was media coverage as well. Ok, so not a big problem yet. How was I to know that the boomerang was already on its way back? Ms. Mala, who was very pleased to see me, casually said that the next segment of the conference was on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and it would be nice if I could represent my company and print media in general and give away a big MNC’s, like T&F’s, perspective on the issue and in the end put in a little something about the book launch as well. Bummer! After that there was no turning back because right that moment a rush of people came out for the tea break and even before I could gently pull myself out of the sticky situation, she introduced me to a couple of people saying “This is ‘Divya’ and she will be representing her company in the next section.” Now I had reasons to be really upset. First she put me on the spotlight when I least expected and then she did not even get my name right! All I had was 15 mins to recall, gather, and stretch all that I had learnt in a teeny tiny chapter on CSR in my Human Resource paper during my MBA. I took my time to put together a few sentences that would do justice to my representation of our company and tried not to remember that camera was recording everything I said.

And so I found myself sitting on the dais with my jeans and hoodie, which by the way made me feel completely out of place since everybody else was dressed formal. There I was; the youngest person in the room, inappropriately dressed, and the least prepared. It all trickled down to the moment where I stood up and spoke quite passionately about CSR that thankfully had been tucked safely in some corner of my mind. Boomerang caught in the nick of time.

Something tells me that many more boomerangs will come my way and no matter how many years I would have put into my career, they will always catch me by surprise and the only thing to do would be to dodge a few and catch the rest. Have you ever found yourself in a tight spot in a new job? Then share your experience(s)!

Disha Lakhanpal