Guest Blog Post by Vivian Gao ‘15

Look­ing at Maisha Walker (Class of ’94), one would not expect to hear that she was any­thing but con­fi­dent in her career path; with her warm, infec­tious smile and enthu­si­as­tic atti­tude, she appeared every bit the suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur who loved what she did.  But this had not always been the case, as Walker revealed to a group of stu­dents dur­ing her recent talk at Career Ser­vices as part of the Imag­ine series.  As a French major who grad­u­ated with­out an idea of where she wanted her career to go, Walker shared that she tack­led the job-search process post-graduation armed with only a pen­cil and the NY Times Clas­si­fied Ads. Now, Walker is the Founder and Pres­i­dent of Mes­sage Medium, a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing agency that helps new and rein­vested brands cre­ate dynamic and prof­itable pres­ences online.

Walker started off her story with a funny anec­dote from her senior year at Prince­ton, dur­ing the time of year when stu­dents start flock­ing to Career Ser­vices clean-shaven and in business-suited hoards.  Walker laugh­ingly recalls how she flagged down one of the girls on her way to an inter­view (“which prob­a­bly wasn’t the nicest thing, now that I think back on it”) and asked the girl what she was inter­view­ing for.  Upon hear­ing the response “con­sult­ing and invest­ment bank­ing,” Walker admits that she had no idea what the fields were at the time, and by the time she real­ized that she actu­ally found the “amor­phous field of busi­ness” inter­est­ing, all the dead­lines for appli­ca­tions were already past.  This story per­haps serves as a gen­tle reminder to stu­dents on just how com­mon it is for stu­dents not to have life planned out upon grad­u­a­tion. Later Walker would go on to work at Mor­gan Stan­ley as an Ana­lyst for 3 years, before a long string of var­i­ous jobs she took on before ulti­mately find­ing her pas­sion for mar­ket­ing and dig­i­tal media.  This served as fur­ther evi­dence that your career path is not always a straight line and that there may be many twists  and turns on the road to find­ing your passion.

Maisha Walker ’94 was the guest speaker for Career Ser­vices’ IMAGINE Speaker Series. Walker deliv­ered a talk for stu­dents about her unimag­ined career jour­ney on Novem­ber 28th.

In her talk, Walker empha­sized to stu­dents the impor­tance of reach­ing out and striv­ing for per­fec­tion, from her expe­ri­ences with con­nect­ing through Princeton’s alumni net­work (post-graduation) and get­ting an inter­view with Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine, to mess­ing up a large-scale project because of care­less­ness in work­ing with Excel.  And, although not directly, Walker demon­strated how opti­mism was the biggest con­trib­u­tor of all to suc­cess: through­out the expe­ri­ence of being unem­ployed and even being fired, Walker main­tained that she was deter­mined to con­tinue explor­ing dif­fer­ent career fields and learn from her mistakes.

In her cur­rent capac­ity as head of a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing agency and the cre­ator of the blog “The Inter­net Strate­gist” for Inc. Mag­a­zine, Walker has plenty of advice for eager stu­dents look­ing to net­work, use social media to build their online image, and land the per­fect job.  But at the heart of the ques­tion of “how do I find my ideal career?”, Walker seems to advo­cate the old fash­ioned method: if at first you don’t suc­ceed, try, try again!  I really enjoyed hear­ing this hon­est, upfront, and per­sonal talk from an accom­plished alumna like Ms. Walker (you can watch her talk here) and look for­ward to hear­ing from future Imag­ine Series speak­ers this spring.