I’ve been working in the digital marketing industry for two years — but my experience and passion for all things digital began long ago.

When I was in middle school in the early 2000s, Xanga was big. I’d mess around making themes with different color schemes and hover-link effects — I thought it was the greatest thing ever. I’ve always loved art and being creative. Front-end development is a great outlet to marry creativity with web design. I’ve done a lot of “learn on your own” programs like Codecademy, Code School, etc. but had a hard time keeping up with it while I was in college/working full-time. I thought it would be wise of me to get more formal training if I wanted to be more serious about it. Enter: TTS, but first….

I started working in the space when I moved to Atlanta in June of 2013. I started at a very small SEO-focused agency. We had a total of 8 people. Being so small, it was a great experience because I was able to wear a lot of different hats. I dipped my toes in SEO, PPC, content creation, keyword research, Google analytics, HTML, banner ad creation, etc. I was able to touch many areas of the industry and get a little bit of experience in each.  

Currently I am an SEM coordinator (think pay-per-click search ads). I work to manage client budgets for paid search campaigns. If you’re unfamiliar with paid search, next time you do a Google or Bing search, notice which ones are ads — that’s what I do. Bidding on client keywords, building campaigns, doing keyword research, reporting, budget optimizations, ad copy creation. Paid search is an important part of marketing for many organizations, so I’m glad I know it well, however I always have that itch to do more creative and visual work.

The agency I work for offers a tuition reimbursement program (awesome!) so I thought “This is my chance to take those classes I’ve always wanted to take! I started by taking Joanna’s front end class at TTS and I absolutely loved it. I am always encouraging my friends and younger people (especially) girls to get involved with coding. Women are extremely underrepresented in the field and there are lots of great things to do and learn and a lot of money to be made.

After finishing the front-end class, I still had an itch to learn more, so I signed up for the part-time code immersion program. I found the part time code immersion class to be more challenging than front end work. Learning ruby and rails has been very valuable and will assist me in opening up new doors at my job.