An undergraduate major in marketing is industry agnostic. This means that you can apply the degree to any industry or field, pairing your passion in marketing with a passion for fashion or business or design or bringing people together. As a marketing major, you can move laterally, from one industry to another, and vertically, rising up the ranks of a company or marketing firm until you are truly an expert in your craft.
We love working with students who are aspiring towards a marketing major, because they tend to have this creativity and ingenuity in their bones. Now, they just need to learn the tricks and tools to take what they know intrinsically and make it concrete in the real world. There are so many places that you can study marketing, but there are a few that are particularly exceptional and worth striving for. The University of Michigan, Penn, and the University of Wisconsin all have amazing programs, as does NYU, Indiana University, and the University of Texas – Austin. To get into one of these top programs, you obviously need to be an exceptional applicant. This means amazing standardized test scores and exceptional grades, but it also requires that an applicant stand out for what’s happening outside of the classroom. That’s where activities and extracurriculars come in.
Our students are the best of the best. They start with the character, drive, and academic ambition, but together we build the application. Often, this means years of collaboration and mentorship that hones their interests and supports them through rigorous extracurriculars. In this post, we are going to give you a peek behind the curtain to get a taste of what we emphasize for our marketing-minded students. Use this post as a guide, but shape it to fit who you are. The secret to your best college outcomes isn’t following a model, it’s making your own path. So, take the advice that works for you, and lean into it. Build who you are into your best possible self, then show your dream schools just how outstanding you are.
At TKG, we achieve dream outcomes through collaboration with our students. Contact us to learn how you can present your best self to your dream schools.
Standing out as a marketing student isn’t easy nor obvious. Most marketing minded students do the same types of things in the same types of ways. In the end, the strongest differentiating factors for these students are their grades and ACT/SAT scores. That’s a problem because it’s quantitative. You do not want your application to be making its strongest argument on your behalf from a quantitative perspective. Instead, below is how to stand out through what you do — not only what you score.
CLUBS
It’s unlikely that your school has a marketing club. If it does, join it — but don’t stop there. We want to see our students actually doing marketing as part of a club that meshes with another passion. This could be a service club, and you run marketing for a big annual community event or fundraiser. Or it could be an academic club that needs to raise money each year to fund a big trip, and you lead that initiative. Or maybe it’s a cultural club, and you run marketing for an annual school event celebrating a holiday or tradition. The key here is that you proactively become involved with the marketing for the club either as the leader of a team, or as a member of a marketing team that you will progress to lead by senior year.
As you do the marketing for this club, or multiple clubs, get creative and try different things out. Instead of only making posters, also call up a local radio station and ask if they will give you an ad for free. Pushing the boundaries of what might be ‘normal’ for the club will lead to strong stories that you can highlight in your applications come senior year.
INTERNSHIP
We highly advise that our students aim for an internship by junior year. Now, you may be able to find an internship as a sophomore, or you may lay the groundwork this year to launch you into an internship next year. Both are valuable. Ultimately, where you want to end up (so what you want to aim for) is an internship that is, at minimum, two weeks long and 20 hours per week — but it can be less time per week if the length of the internship is longer. This internship should be with a marketing firm, or within the marketing department of a company. It is not a good internship if you will be the de facto marketing person with no one to guide you. Rather, you need to be working under an expert in marketing who can guide and inform you.
A PART-TIME OR SUMMER JOB
An internship is awesome, but we want to see you go beyond that. We encourage our marketing-minded students to secure a summer job after their sophomore year of high school, or a part-time job during the school year if their schedule permits it. Now, this job is probably not going to be in a marketing department — you don’t have the cred yet. But you do have skills, and this is a great time to develop customer relationship chops and to learn how a business works. There may also be opportunities to bring some marketing into what you are doing. If you work at a restaurant, you could strategize with management about ways of bringing new eaters in. If you are working for a boutique that prides itself on having the newest trends, you could come up with ways of telling that story. The key here is getting a job with a small, locally-owned business, not some big brand. The big brand may sound more impressive at a distance, but applying to college is all about storytelling, not brand names. You’ll have a much greater impact at a small company. They’re more likely to give you real responsibility, too.
SOCIAL MEDIA
It is really easy for young students seeking a part-time job or internship in marketing to get pushed into doing the social media for a small company. “You’re young, so you understand this — right?” is a common refrain. And maybe that is true for you, but we encourage our students to be careful about getting shoe-horned solely into social media management as it isn’t all that differentiating that you know how to use Tik Tok.
Now, one exception is if you decide to start your own small marketing company with two or more small, local clients and you make their businesses explode. This can be a great way to explore different types of marketing and analytics while learning to build relationships and manage client expectations. Now, the crux of this, or the most important and tricky part, is that you need to actually get results. It is also a good idea to layer this with academic marketing courses so that you can reference strategies and results in your college essays.
So, if you want to do this you need to seriously commit as if it were a varsity sport. Plan to spend multiple hours a day communicating with and taking actions for clients. You also need to remember that you aren’t a professional at this yet, and so won’t be paid like one. Making minimum wage is absolutely worth it if you’re building your application alongside getting some spending money.
Preparing to apply to college with a marketing degree in mind requires doing a lot of marketing before you even press submit. You’re marketing for clubs, for companies, and for yourself. Because what is a college application if not a personal marketing tool? It’s an argument for how awesome you are, and that’s pretty cool.
Getting into impressive schools requires equally impressive strategy. Get yours. .