Karin Robinson ’12 works for HubSpot as a Support Engineer in Boston. She describes herself as an avid hipster researcher, radio aficionado and yoga enthusiast. Take a look into Karin’s journey from Wellesley College student to recent graduate.
When I graduated in May of 2012, my boyfriend and I stuffed his CR-V full to the brim with my worldly belongings and made the southbound journey from Boston to New York. I had a dutifully scouted apartment awaiting me in Brooklyn and a job in Midtown working as a reporter for a trade publication. As we made the drive to New York, I thought to myself, “This is the dream. I am off to start a new beginning.”
In a lot of ways, this move wasn’t entirely unlike that first plane trip I took from San Antonio, Texas to Boston, Massachusetts to begin my first semester at Wellesley. When the plane crested over Boston Harbor, I saw the city skyline and thought that everything seemed perfect in that moment.
But on the road to New York, I needed to keep telling myself, “Yes, this is the dream,” without being entirely convinced. This was supposed to be a part of The Plan I had worked on for three years, too; after deciding in sophomore year that I wanted to be a radio host on National Public Radio, I did everything that I thought would help me get there. I worked with WZLY, decided to study in the social sciences, and interned with WGBH and KLRN. The Plan became that I would get an entry-level job in journalism once I graduated, attend graduate school after two years, and then land a job as a reporter with a major network.
As it turned out, there were a lot of different ways to be a reporter, not all of which involved going out into the field and asking people questions. When I accepted a position with Ad-Fax News to work as a junior reporter through the CWS, I hadn’t given much consideration to what exactly I might be doing.
My time as a junior reporter was one of the loneliest I had ever experienced. I had moved to a new city without a strong network of friends, and even at work I had a hard time making friends in an office with an older, quieter crowd. On top of that, I lived in Brooklyn while most of my former classmates lived in the Upper East Side, New Jersey, or The Village. After three months in New York, it became clear that I was not happy. In August, I decided to start applying for jobs again.
More than anything, I wanted an environment in which I could learn new information. At first I gravitated towards jobs in the advertising and marketing field, wanting to leverage my penchant for content creation. But on a whim, I decided to apply for a job at the Boston marketing software start-up, HubSpot as a Support Engineer. My knowledge in the field was fairly cursory, but my experiences as the Technical Director at WZLY and programming skills learned from CS 114 were apparently enough; I got the job the same day that I interviewed.
Since then, I have felt so lucky to have received a liberal arts education at Wellesley, because it allowed me to be flexible with job prospects once I was out of college. I have encouraged many of my friends and classmates to join the start-up industry, knowing from experience that liberal arts students make wonderful candidates.
I have worked at HubSpot for four months now, and it has been a wonderful learning and work environment. I am taking HTML and CSS classes once a week before work, and even have been programming my own website, at www.karinchristinerobinson.com. I can’t say that I’m certain about what I want to do with my career from here on, and this may not be a part of The Plan, but I’m not worried. Right now, I have a wonderful job, a supportive network, and a feeling that I can do anything so long as I feel passionate about it. I’m even toying with the idea of business school in a couple years. So thank you, Wellesley, for giving me the intellectual strength and the emotional courage to jump outside my comfort zone and try new things. It may not have been what I planned, but it seems to be working rather well.