Benjamin Brown

Throughout my 32 years on this Earth, I have lived many places and taken on many roles. Born in Ohio before moving to Michigan and then Nebraska, I was a small Midwestern boy with big city dreams hoping to strike it big in the animation or video game industry but I didn’t know the first thing about getting a career in media. So I went to Culver Stockton College to earn my Bachelor of Arts and hope for the best.

Post graduation, I really wasn’t sure what to do with my life. I had naively assumed that my double major in English and Theatre equated to a film degree and that I could just apply to be a showrunner for a major network like any other job. Even if that were the case though, I certainly wasn’t going to find work in the animation or games industry living in Lincoln, Nebraska. So I set my eyes on New York City.

For seven wonderful years, I lived in The Big Apple working first as a teacher at an after-school program, then a secretary for a home renovation company, and then a writer for a news outlet. Finally, I discovered Zola.

Hired on as a temp agent in their Customer Service department, I quickly worked my way up to a full-time employee and, eventually, a “Customer Focus Award” winning Team Lead. For four years, I worked there and a lot happened during that time. We moved offices, reformatted the website a couple dozen times, I even survived a huge wave of layoffs caused by the pandemic but, unfortunately, that was only the first round. In November 2022, I too was let go from the company. The blow was devastating for me. For months, I tried to stay in New York and find a job in Customer Service or Writing or Administrative Assistance again. I got a lot of interviews but no offers. Eventually, I decided that it made the most financial sense to move to Minnesota and live with my brother with the eventual goal of moving back to a bigger city.

My first six months out in Minneapolis were quite challenging. I felt like I had given up on my dreams and coasted through life only to later pay the price but then I thought back on the “Explorership Program” which I had experienced at Zola. It gave Customer Service workers the opportunity to shadow other departments and determine what direction they would want to head in for their future careers. By participating, I determined that a job in Marketing made a lot of sense for me because it served as a combination of the creative and collaborative efforts I made as a theatre kid back in college and the corporate office experience that I was already gaining at Zola. By the time I was laid off, I had already been making moves to switch from customer service into marketing but obviously I got let go before such a move could take place. Still, being in a new state where I did not yet feel comfortable made for the perfect set of circumstances to continue pursuing a marketing career by enrolling in the University of Minnesota’s Digital Marketing Bootcamp.

After six long months of taking classes and working on projects on top of already working a full-time job, I graduated the program with a 4.0 GPA. Now, with that experience under my belt, I’m hungry to jump into a full-time job in marketing with a focus on social media and copywriting.

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