Hi.
My name is Alicia Winokur.
I had a really similar experience to Dani.
I worked at a really, really small marketing company.
And, when I say "really, really small,"
I mean really, really small.
I was the fifth employee.
That was our entire office.
[LAUGHTER]
At Carlton PR & Marketing, a lot of what I did
was things like writing press releases
and doing social media for companies that were just
getting on their feet.
Bobbie Carlton, the founder of the company, her main focus
was helping startups become bigger.
And most of them will become the next Facebook
or the next Instagram.
And a lot of them are doing really cool things.
And that is kind of why I wanted to work there.
But the way I got there was a little more
interesting than just wanting to help startups.
I'm a journalism and English major/minor.
And my advisor, Catherine Manegold,
told me that a lot of people who start out in journalism
end up going to public relations.
And so here I am, thinking, well,
I don't want to spend $100,000 getting a journalism
grad school degree and then not using it.
But I also don't want to do the same thing for PR
and realize I hate it.
So I cast a very wide net of applications
out into the world.
And I never heard back from any of them.
[LAUGHTER]
Not a single one.
But I may have been reaching a little high.
But my dad has worked in marketing for many, many years
and happened to know this woman, Bobbie Carlton.
And he said, why don't you go in, interview with her?
And, voila, she hired me.
So, a lot like Dani, I was lucky enough
to have someone in my life to set me up with this.
But, boy, did that net I cast really fall through.
[LAUGHTER]
So, most of what I did, aside from the press releases
and Twitter stuff, was this website
called Innovation Women.
You can see Bobbie Carlton, there, at the top.
Bobbie started this website in response to the fact
that, whenever she would go to panels, it would be all men.
And this was happening a lot, especially in the STEM field.
And she would ask the people who were running the panels,
like, why are there no women on your panels?
And they would say, oh, we had one, but she couldn't come.
Or, oh, we just couldn't find anyone who was qualified.
And I think we all know that's totally false.
There are scores of qualified women
who could have been on that panel,
but they just didn't bother to look for them.
So Innovation Women is a speaker's bureau
for entrepreneurial and technical women.
And all the women on here-- well, most of them,
not all of them--
have some sort of link to either being a small-business
owner or a big-business owner, or they work in STEM field,
or they have something to contribute to a panel
so that it's not a boys' club.
And most of my work for this was helping the people
on this website promote themselves,
so that they would be hired for these panels.
A lot of what I did was, someone would sign up for the website
and say, I don't have time to make my own profile.
Like, I'm busy.
I've got a lot to do.
And I would say, that's totally fine.
Send me your link, and send me your website.
I will make a profile for you, and we'll call it a day.
[LAUGHTER]
And what I found was that a lot of these women
had a lot more to them than met the eye.
And it wasn't just that they worked in business
and they could only talk about business.
They had also started their own company and it had failed.
But they learned from that, and they could talk about that.
Or they had worked in a bunch of different industries,
and they would be able to do a lot more than just
talk about business or just talk about PR.
And what I really loved about this
was that it was putting back into the world, like,
women, basically, where they weren't previously, before.
And actually this website has done a lot.
Within the first week, people were getting
asked to speak on panels.
And, to me, that's amazing.
And I feel like I really helped with that,
like this was something that I did
and I made something amazing happen.
A lot of what I did for this website also was outreach.
What we wanted was to expand beyond Boston, because it was
a Boston-based company and a lot of the people
Bobbie knew were in the Boston area.
When I started, most of our people
were from Boston and the area.
By the time I finished, we had reached out
to Seattle and DC, New York City,
and we were even thinking about reaching out to Australia--
which was pretty cool.
And what that entailed was a lot of goggling, in all honesty.
I would look up "women's groups in New York City,"
"business women's groups in New York City."
And you pull names from that, and you email them and say,
we have this amazing website that we
want you to be a part of, because we all
know that is an issue, when it comes to panels.
And we want you to be a solution.
We want you to help us solve the problem.
And, overwhelmingly, people would say, yes,
we want to do that.
This is something we're really interested in.
I'm not sure how many people are on the website
now, because it's been approximately three months
since I worked for them.
But the growth was--
I think when I started there were around maybe 50 profiles
on the website.
By the time I left, there were over 100.
So I felt really good about myself.
[LAUGHTER]
I helped double the amount of people on this website.
And I think, a lot like Dani, I didn't really
have experience in marking or public relations,
before I went in.
And it was a really rare experience for me.
It's a very different kind of writing, especially different
from journalism.
Because in journalism you want to tell
the truth, no matter what.
But in marketing--
[LAUGHTER]
--you're trying to sell a product!
You're trying to sell somebody!
I know-- you all laughed at the journalism thing,
but you do want to tell the truth-- or at least I do.
[LAUGHTER]
But it was very weird for me, to be trying to sell things
to people, even when I didn't necessarily
know what it was about or didn't necessarily believe in it.
So that was really difficult.
But what I found was that was actually better
for me to learn than if I had just worked a journalism job
and not ever known that, honestly, I really
don't like marketing.
[LAUGHTER]
And I wish I had liked it more, but I
think it was better that I didn't like it.
Because now I know.
And, moving forward, I can really
dedicate yourself to journalism and maybe aim
a little lower than trying to apply to the New York Times
when I have almost zero newspaper experience.
But now I know.
And that's the biggest thing I took away from this,
that, even if you end up completely hating
the internship you get, that's OK,
because you know you hated it.
I didn't hate mine.
It was just not for me.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you!
[APPLAUSE]