Today, the Board of Directors came for their annual meeting, and Brandcenter students were given the opportunity to go into breakout sessions with members of the BOD. I honestly didn’t expect to gain much from it, prejudging everyone, deciding that they were old and wouldn’t have anything relevant for us young bucks. I braced myself for what those dinosaur killers warned us about, and I went into my breakout session without any questions prepared. To my surprise, however, I found myself holding back from taking notes at times so I wouldn’t feel like such a groupie! 

Members from the BOD in my breakout session were Joe Sciarrotta (CCO at Ogilvy & Mather) and Tata Sato (Managing Partner and Director of Insights at MindShare), and Dave Knox (Brand Manager at P&G) who was sitting in as a special guest.

I came out with a lot of helpful tips and golden nuggets of information that my tuition has [happily] paid for; but what resonated the most with me was the talk about having transferrable skills. As a Creative Technologist, we’re still working as a track and as individuals to define who and what we are to the advertising industry. But then moments like these creep in and remind me that maybe having no concrete label could totally work to my advantage! This mentality fit so well with all the things I wanted to accomplish in the long run. Throughout the afternoon, I was able to better sort what role I want to play when I begin to work. I realized that I never want to be categorized as an information architect or a Flash developer or whatever tech-geek term could possibly exist for what a Creative Technologist is. I want to be accepted as me being me and not because I fit some mold that needs to be filled. 

That led me to question my role as a minority in the advertising industry. I spoke with Tata Sato afterwards about whether I was sought after just because I was a Filipino American female to fulfill a quota, or because there really is an inherent benefit to increasing diversity in the field. While I am fully aware of the benefit to me personally and to Filipino Americans as a culture, I wasn’t too sure of what was in it for the advertising world. What is my importance? What am I bringing? Ms. Sato put it plainly: my experience. She brought to light that there were things I innately understood about segments of the population that should not be ignored. She reassured me that though there is the motive of agencies seeking to be “politically correct” with their employee pool, there is deeper relevance in my role as a Filipino American woman in advertising that I have the power to instill. To me, it goes beyond representing the underrepresented, but using my skills to empower a voice — something I was able to do at Virginia Tech through the Filipino American Student Association. I’d love to some day return to working for my FilAm community, but for now, I’m going to continue in this phase of building those transferrable skills, remembering that this all applies to more than just advertising.