MISS CAILA BURKE

today, i got to do a little interview with the wonderful CAILA BURKE. she is one of the most motivated, generous people i have ever met, and rocks the social media/marketing world. it hasn't even been a year since she's graduated and she's gotten some awesome opportunities. i'm proud to call her my friend, and look forward to seeing what RAD company asks for her next. CAILA BURKE currently works at burton. here's the interview:

How old are you? 22!

What is your field? Marketing, to sum it all up. But mainly social media/digital marketing, brand/event marketing and mainly within the action sports industry.

What was your first step in getting a job while you were in your last semester of college? For my senior internship class, one of our assignments was to search around for 'dream jobs' and apply to the ones we thought we were eligible for; to practice writing cover letters, and sending out our resumes. I applied for a paid internship with Nike Action Sports in Oregon - thinking it was a long shot - but within a week I got a call, and within 1 month I moved out to Oregon for the summer to take the internship.

Do you think internships are important? Definitely. I've had 4 or 5 internships and I've learned different things during each of them. You do a lot of work that you might not want to do as part of your career, but you also do things that make you realize more specifically what you would like to do or what you want to look for in an actual job. Internships were huge for me because of the networking with different people, the real life experience with dealing with actual companies/clients, and having to work with full time employees to get a better idea of what it was like to work in the industry that I was interested in.

What internships did you have during your college career at Champlain? I started with a lame internship at a small clothing company, all I did was work with Excel, which I am now thankful for, but at the time wasn't too psyched. I then landed an internship with Okay!! Okay!! Marketing Agency, where I was an intern for about 2 years, doing almost any and every type of marketing for every client. I learned the most from that internship; like what types of marketing I was most interested in, and I really grew to love the action sports industry. I was also an intern at Fuse Youth Marketing Agency, where I worked further with action sports and youth marketing. I did a lot of 'bitch' work here, but I learned a lot about the logistics and planning that goes in to marketing.

Could you tell me a bit about how you got a job with Nike? How did you get in touch? Did you have references? As I said above, I was searching for dream jobs online for my Senior Internship class, and came across the position on Malakye.com, which is an action sports/youth culture job site. I always wanted to check out Portland, and this internship sounded pretty cool, so I applied for it. Nike has a collegiate summer internship program for college athletes, but luckily Nike Action Sports was looking for people who were non-traditional athletes, and since I had previous action sports experience from my other internships, and was really into snowboarding, they called me right away.

What social media sites do you use? I mess around with a lot of them, but I mainly use Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Tumblr.

What do you think are your strengths? I think I realized early on in school what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to be and I just went for it. I lucked out with the first internship I got at Okay!! Okay!! and from there used my contacts/networking to get my second internship at Fuse. I did a lot of work for free while I was in college, but I gained a lot of experience from that. I think you just have to be passionate about something, and just go for it.

What do you think a college graduate needs in order to get a job after graduation? Honestly, internship experience. Being able to prove that you worked on actual projects, with real client. And the ability to speak confidently in interviews. You can have all the in-class and internship experience in the world, but if you can't answer questions in an interview and sound like you know what you are talking about, then all that experience isn't that important.

thanks caila!