SHARON TERCHA: Hi, I'm Sharon Tercha, and I'm director of strategic communications for Penn State University at the Lehigh Valley campus. I started out a long time ago working for the American Red Cross, and it was an exceptional opportunity to move into a nonprofit world, where you could really get your hands on a lot of things. You could explore, marketing, public relations, events planning, development from so many different angles-- as a writer, as a designer, as a spokesperson, as a leader, and a project manager. 

It really helped me narrow down what aspects of marketing and PR I wanted to really be involved in in the long term. And over the course of my career, I moved through higher ed, I led a strategic communications team in the national banking world, I worked for a global leadership organization, and now I've rounded back to my alma mater, Penn State. What I love most about my marketing positions over the years is the strategic and the creative process. 

And many years ago, when I first started, that moment interviewing people, putting campaigns out, and seeing what worked, what didn't work, and learning from it so next time around we could do things differently. Today, with the onset of digital and the ability to follow the analytics really from minute to minute, it means tracking everything, optimizing on the fly, and reassessing your work constantly so that you can compete. So it really takes on a new life in terms of the types of days that you would have. 

It's less interaction with people, a little bit more interaction with your numbers and the data. Marketing has changed more in the past 10 to 15 years than it has in the previous, say, 100. When you think about even the terms that we're using right now, you're optimizing SEO, SEM, web 30, all the types of things that you're doing now through social media, through the user experience, modeling attribution. It's a whole new language. 

It's all new tools. It's new policies, procedures, and skill sets. So when I look back on what my job was like 30 years ago versus what it's like today and what the modern marketer needs to do, it's so vastly different. They're not even comparable. Really, everything is served up digitally. 

There's eight second attention spans. Video is king in terms of gathering attention, and like I said, you're in a place where there are ad impressions 6,000 to 10,000 a day we as Americans see. So being able to cut through that clutter is an enormous accomplishment. It's enormous challenge, but it's very doable if you can pull the right teams together. 

We now have in place that we can make that happen for you. I hate to go back to this example, but it's no longer, oh, I need a brochure. It's I need an entire digital campaign. Where should we put that? What should it look like? 

What should the spend be, and how should it go? So it's vastly different for me at this point. COVID added all kinds of layers of things. So another piece of this is world events can quickly impact your days and bring on different things. 

Crisis communications becomes a big piece of it. You may think that social media is all fun and games, but one bad comment, one controversial move, one misstep on social media, and it can turn into something that blows up nationally. So there are so many different aspects of my job that I'd love to say that any day is typical, but I have to say that the typical day is that it's rarely ever the same thing. 

My art teacher at the time, Linda Ross, same thing, she actually called attention to some of my talents in the world of photography and design, which I didn't end up pursuing that direction, but I took enough of the classes so that I could have a good design eye. So when I am working with my design teams in the agencies, I know what I'm looking at. I know how to be a thought partner to them and to actually critique some of the work. 

So I can give a lot of examples of how Penn State helped prepare me for the job, and also, I'm back in a digital analytics master's program right now, and it is just mind blowing how good the program is in terms of the industry experience and the professors that I'm learning from and how hard it is, but also how amazing it is, how much I'm learning at Penn State again. In terms of my challenges over the years, one of the biggest challenges you're going to face as a marketer is you're going to be enormously proud of your work, and a lot of it can be subjective, at least at first, and people are always going to have opinions about your work. 

They are going to critique you ruthlessly and gratuitously, and you're going to be offended. And you have got to have thick skin but find a balance so that you don't shut down their input and you can glean good pieces of their feedback without taking it personally and getting offended. So one of the things that I really love about the field of marketing is there's so many different ways that you can become a professional in this field. 

You don't have to be the creative person. You can be the statistician. You can become the person who goes into sociology and really studies people so you understand your target market and you're bringing that aspect of the skill set to the table. 

You can be the project manager that keeps the flow going. You can be all kinds of different people within this field. The other thing is that you can grow with it. I loved public relations when I was younger. I wanted to be on camera. I loved the fact that I got to be on CNN when I was 24 years old. I was on talk shows for the Red Cross and those sorts of things. 

So in that overarching marketing field as a communicator, I loved that. I don't want to do that so much anymore, which is funny because I'm being interviewed today. I want to be a little bit more behind the scenes. So I've been able to grow and evolve in that way. I've had the opportunity to work in the creative space and do really fun, funky, out there commercials and campaigns that made people pause along the way, and that was great for that phase in my life. 

You can do anything in this field. You can be any type of person and find a place at the table of marketing.