Demitria Ferreira graduated from UMass Dartmouth in December 2012. During her junior year, she knew I needed to secure an internship position. So I searched on CCB's internship blog for open positions. She applied and was hired for an internship position with a shoe company called, Rockport (a subsidiary of the Adidas Group) and based in Canton, MA. At that point, other than a with UMD's Center for Marketing Research, Demitria had zero experience in marketing. She had worked for a bakery and Walgreens so while she may have lacked skills in marketing she did know how to work hard. And that fact is a very important part of this story. Internships are important but so too is working part-time in almost any job and having a great work ethic.
Demitria's internship was supposed to end in May of 2011, but her boss had really admired her drive to learn more each day, take on as many projects as possible, stay late when necessary, and so she asked if Demitria wouldn't mind staying along for the summer. After all, she had mastered her roles and responsibilities, keeping her on for an extra semester meant that her boss didn't have to go through the learning curve with another intern.
Demitria also knew that over the summer she had an opportunity to continue showcase her abilities and to really prove her drive, she asked to work full time over the summer. At that point, she had now been mastering both her job in marketing as well as learning a lot about the field of merchandising. She was now maintaining projects, from inception to execution. And come the end of summer, when her internship was supposed to end, they again asked her to stay on.
She graduated from UMass a semester early, so in December when she finished school, Rockport took her on as a temp and after the second week of January, she had a full time position as the Retail Marketing Coordinator. A year later she was promoted to US Retail Activation Associate Manager, and now even has interns of her own!
If there's one piece of advice that she can offer up on how to get a job after graduation, it would be to work as hard as possible, always strive to learn more, and offer your help any and everywhere possible. Demitria says: "There is no job/internship or anything in this world that can't be taught to someone (like I was taught on my internship), but hard work and passion, that comes from within and speaks volumes on the job."
