“She never liked school. Today, she’s a digital marketer at a Fortune 500 company.”
Raquel, Digital Marketer, Fortune 500 company
3 minute read
- Student story
- Digital
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Raquel has a clear idea of what her 18-year-old self would say if she could see her now.
“She would be like, ‘What is she doing here? She doesn’t belong here at all.’”
Back then, she was working 12-hour days. Eating out was something she couldn’t afford, and she didn’t have the time for it anyway.
“After a 12-hour shift, you just want to go home and sleep.”
School had never been her thing. “I never really liked school,” she says. But seeing what other people had, and what she didn’t, gave her something to aim for. “It just fuelled me, and I just said, let’s try and get it.”
She knew what she wanted: a dream job in a corporate setting. To work out how to get there, she looked back at what she had enjoyed. In sixth form, that was marketing. “So that’s how it came to digital marketing.”
When she started looking at ICE Campus, it felt relaxed, and she liked that the focus went beyond the learning itself to what it could bring to her life.
Her classes ran Online Live. She could talk to the other students and the educator, and ask questions in the moment or after the lesson. “I think that’s a very nice feeling to have.”
Cost didn’t hold her back either. “With ICE, money is not really a block or a problem.” Through the Get Qualified scheme, she knew a chunk of her fees would come back once she finished, which gave her every reason to pay attention and pass. “If that’s not a great motivator, I don’t know what is.”
She also felt the team understood her situation. That meant a lot to her, and it’s part of the reason she signed up for the postgraduate course next.
The postgraduate was new ground. She had never studied at that level before, and she went in not knowing what was coming. “It was quite a whirlwind.” Looking at the work ahead, she didn’t know how she would do all of it, but she decided she would. This was before AI tools were around to help.
Then came the moment that stuck with her. The company she had written her thesis on put the social media strategy from her thesis into practice.
“The company that I had written the thesis on actually implemented the strategy that I did my thesis on. It was so mind-blowing.”
“I was like, ‘Wow, they’re actually using my strategy for social media on their social media.’ It gave me goosebumps. I was like, ‘I did it. I don’t know how, but I did it.’”
Today, Raquel is a digital marketer at a Fortune 500 company. She sees learning as something that never really stops. If she ever needs to learn a new industry and ICE Campus offers a course in it, coming back is “definitely possible.”
Her advice to anyone living a life that doesn’t match the one they picture is simple.
“You really have to just say, ‘OK, this is my time to change. How am I going to do it?’ And you just start.”
