“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

– Steve Jobs

When I tell people that I’m an Online Marketing Intern at RadiusOnline, most of them respond: “Why marketing?” And don’t get me wrong, it’s not because marketing is a bad field to work in or anything. In fact, it’s an awesome field! So why do so many people ask me this then? Well, it probably has something to do with the fact that I just graduated with a Bachelors Degree in chemistry. To be honest, I know it sounds crazy, but I promise that if you’ll just follow along I’ll show you that transitioning from chemistry to marketing isn’t that absurd.

Looking back on my four years of studying chemistry, I think there are 3 major things I learned that I have been able to apply during my time here at RadiusOnline:

1. Creative Passion

2. Scientific Method

3. Data Analysis

Creative Passion

Chemistry– In Organic Chemistry, you’ll find that there isn’t a strict one-way to do anything. Often times a typical situation consists of a problem to solve, a tool box, and a plethora of blank space. As long as you use the tool box and arrive at an acceptable answer, you can build whatever kind of mechanism or synthesis that you want.

Marketing– In the same way, a big part of marketing is being able to grab a lead’s attention in a unique way, and this really requires a creative approach. Currently, Nick and I are working on an E-mail Drip Campaign for CarCareCONNECT, and one of the coolest things about this project is that we were given the creative freedom to organize, structure, and implement this campaign.

Scientific Method

Chemistry– When you look at any scientific research article, you’ll see that it’s always structured in the same exact way: Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Analysis/Results, Conclusion.

Marketing– When you look at the way market trend research or A/B testing is done, you’ll see that the same type of experimental procedure is conducted throughout the process. For our Drip Campaign, Nick and I spent a good portion of this week observing a large number of emails and creating a list of attributes that we thought were not only eye-catching but also relevant to our target audience: auto shop owners. According to this method, our next step would then be to narrow down a list of email attributes from our research that we believe would work for this specific campaign.

Data Analysis

Chemistry– What kind of science would exist if there were no data analysis to back it up? Every scientific discovery and experiment always include a section for results analysis because this is the only way to support your hypothesis with hard metrics and numbers.

Marketing– A big portion of digital marketing is Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO, which provides a lot of these same metrics to the marketing that is done. (Note: Click here to learn more about SEO). One thing that our SEO team at RadiusOnline does is provide our clients with web traffic analytics reports for their business website. However, in order to show our clients how their websites are performing, the SEO team needs to review large amounts of data, choose what is relevant, make conclusions based on this data, and present it in a way that is easily understandable.

In the end, I found that what I loved wasn’t necessarily chemistry, but the process of innovation and discovery that fueled it. By transitioning from chemistry to marketing, I get to work in a field that not only provides me with different creative avenues but also capitalizes on many of the skills that I have started to learn from studying chemistry. And I am so excited to be starting this internship with RadiusOnline because over here the sky’s not the limit; we’re always aiming “ever onward and upward.”

**If you want to learn more about the experience at RadiusOnline or apply for an internship, check out our Glassdoor page or visit us at RadiusOnline.com