How I Got a Marketing Internship After Dropping Out of College

And How You Too Can Succeed Without a College Degree

How I Got Here

Rewind to last year. I’m a college student majoring in marketing. This was the second college I went to and my second major. If you’ve had to deal with switching schools then you’re familiar with the bureaucratic mess that ensues when you switch schools. Long story short, only a few of my credits got transferred. In other, more provocative words, I just wasted 2 years (and too much money to fathom) in a school where about 70% of the classes I took meant nothing. Zilch. Bye-bye time and money!

So here I was. In my 4th year of college stuck somewhere in between being a freshman and a senior. It was miserable. To make matters even worse, I was learning more on my own through books and podcasts than I was in school. And the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t visible.

I reluctantly went to my classes. They bored me. They didn’t teach me anything actionable. Or anything valuable at all. For example, in my marketing class, we just went through powerpoint after powerpoint of academic “marketing”. Red flares were going off in my mind. Why should I learn from “marketers” that don’t even have to market their book? It’s *required* by the teacher for the class. You can only force people to buy your stuff in the world of Academia. This doesn’t happen in “the real world”.

So I drifted deeper into despair.

But as I was strolling through campus on my way to waste another hour of my time in class, I heard something that would change my life. I was listening to a podcast and this host had a new promotion. Praxis.

What’s Praxis?

Praxis was created for students like me. For those underwhelmed by college. See, I was always a good student. But as I progressed from kindergarten to high school, and then to college, I became more and more dissatisfied with schooling. I thought college was going to be different than high school. I was wrong.

College turned out to be high school with bigger classes. The same failed formula persisted. Take classes that have no relation to what you want to do in life, e.g. a weather class for someone interested in marketing. Then struggle to pay attention in class. And finally, try to cram for the exams, only to forget everything 5 minutes after the exam ended.

I was wasting the most precious years of my life. I wanted real experience. I wanted to be challenged. And most of all, I wanted to learn something that would help me in my career. College offered none of that, but Praxis did.

Praxis is an apprenticeship program geared to entrepreneurial students. Praxis offered a bootcamp program focused on developing skills you would actually need instead of taking random classes for two (or more) years just so you can spend the next two (or more) years finally studying your field of interest. And Praxis promised an apprenticeship with a startup company for real life experience, while only 27% of college graduates land a job in their field of study.

After hearing their ad, I became obsessed with the idea. I couldn’t even focus on what the professor was saying that day.

At this point, I knew I had to drop out of college to save my sanity.

So I went home and filled out an application for Praxis. Their application process is competitive. I had to make a video of myself answering tough questions. I had to make a resume (something I never had to do for college). And I had to go through several interviews with the Praxis staff.

The whole process took about a month. I didn’t tell my family until I was accepted. This gave me anxiety because I felt that Praxis was my only route to escape the endless tunnel of disappointment.

But I was accepted. And I dropped out of college forever.

How Praxis Prepared Me For a Job

The first three months of the Praxis program are dedicated to making you valuable in the eyes of future employers.

In Month One, I had to create a personal website, a pitch deck, and a 30-second elevator pitch. To demonstrate how much more valuable this was than school, I need you to click a couple links.

First, click here. This is my personal website I created at Praxis. Then, click here and compare for yourself. This is the personal website I created for school at the first college I attended. I got an A on the project. But WordPress wasn’t even a requirement! So, like any smart college student, I took the lazy route and used Weebly. (Just to clarify: the second website was made four years ago. And I know, embarrassing is an understatement.)

This newfound knowledge of WordPress allowed me to recreate my band’s, The Bees Trees, website. For years we had to outsource our website design to third parties. Then, as GoDaddy offered a new drag and drop feature, we were able to create an aesthetically pleasing website ourselves, but it was missing crucial features like the ability to engage in e-commerce. So I took this new skill I learned (that, for the record, I never learned in college) and created a functional WordPress website.

Then in Month Two, we had to blog every single day. It was during Month Two that I realized nearly everything you learn about writing in school is wrong. In school, you write for your professor’s eyes only. In the real world, you want as many people reading your blog as possible. Just compare my blog for my current website with the one I created for school. The differences should be blatant.

Then in Month Three, I was working with my advisor to find job opportunities. I had a few opportunities on my plate. Some of them fell through for various reasons. Until I heard about YesInsights with the help of Praxis and another third party organization called Get Apprenticeship.

How I Landed an Apprenticeship With YesInsights

I had a list of tasks I needed to complete to showcase my skills to Russ Perry, the owner of Design Pickle, Jar, and most recently, YesInsights. For those too lazy to click the link above, my tasks included recording a 90-second video answering these three questions:

1. What are your career goals?
2. What are you really good at professionally?
3. What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?

Here’s the video I created if you are interested.

Then, I had to create a screen capture video of a website I really liked and explain why I liked it. You can watch this video too.

As I’m sure you can tell, the Praxis program was instrumental in my preparation and success. I had already had to make several videos for Praxis.

After a few weeks, Taylor Pearson from Get Apprenticeship emailed me. I was one of six finalists out of dozens of people. He gave us another task. Now he wanted us to create a blog post on NPS (net promoter score) as if it would be sent it out to clients of YesInsights. We had a few days to accomplish this. I set everything else aside and worked exclusively on making the best blog post I could.

I don’t have any proof, but I think I was one of the few to actually write about NPS on my blog (I imagine the others just created a Google Doc). But I wanted to stand out, and show Russ and Taylor what the formatting would look like on a blog. You can check out my post here.

Again, it should be obvious how much Praxis helped me with accomplishing this. I was prepared. I already had a blog. And I have been writing a great deal in 2017.

A few days later Russ emailed me to tell me I was one of two finalists. Now he wanted me to take a Kolbe test. A Kolbe test asks a series of questions to determine your natural talents, as well as your strengths and weaknesses.

I sent my Kolbe results within the hour. Now I knew I had to prove the value I could create for YesInsights.

I began brainstorming how I could create value. So I started by looking at what YesInsight’s competition was doing, and room for growth for YesInsights. I created a Google Doc of this information that I would send to Russ two days later. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to link to that Google Doc.

I realized most of the competition was offering a free eBook in exchange for an email address. I was relatively new to the world of NPS, but YesInsights had a bunch of old blog posts filled with valuable information. So I began to organize the blog posts into different topics and I began creating an outline of the chapters. I sent this to Russ when I sent the other Google Doc.

When he saw that I demonstrated forward tilt, a key philosophical tenet of Praxis, he wanted to schedule a call immediately. So I sent him my availability and told him I would have a rough copy PDF version of the eBook ready in a couple days.

I copied and pasted all the blog posts in order, then I read the entirety of the eBook and fixed any grammatical errors. I sent him the PDF version of the eBook the next day.

Fast forward to our call. He was impressed. He even told me he wanted to schedule a call as soon as possible because of the work I already did. Work that he didn’t even ask for. I was already demonstrating the value I could bring to his business.

To my knowledge, Russ never even called the other finalist. Poor guy (or gal). When our call ended, he said he would send over the job contract in the next few days.

I did it! I took the path less traveled in today’s world. And I have been blessed with an opportunity of a lifetime.

Why YesInsights is My Dream First Job

YesInsights was particularly attractive to me. As I mentioned above, I’m in a band and we are currently recording a new album. YesInsights is a completely remote job. Which means I can work from anywhere as long as I have access to wi-fi.

Actually, while I was going through the application process, Russ and his family were in Belize for six weeks. Travel is just one perk of running an online business.

Another perk of the YesInsights apprenticeship is that I will get to work closely with Russ, the CEO. I doubt many college graduates can tout that they got to work closely with the CEO of their company after being hired. And Russ has accolades. Russ has already created a successful online company, Design Pickle, and he just added Jar and YesInsights under his belt.

One of my long-term goals is to operate my own online business some day. Working closely with Russ will be crucial to my future success.

And lastly, for all the people taking (potentially unpaid) internships this summer as part of a college curriculum, my apprenticeship is paid. And I’ll make more than just money. I won’t be the errand boy that has to go get coffee for my superiors. I won’t be doing exclusively busy work. Instead, I will be cultivating my marketing skills and providing real value to myself and to YesInsights.

Don’t think a college degree is the key to success. It’s not. Providing value to any future employer is what will put you ahead of the game, whether you have a degree or not. Well, only if you are vigorously working on building your own human capital and developing skills that will make you stand out.

I broke the mold, and if I can do it, you can too.

I start my apprenticeship tomorrow at YesInsights. And I can’t wait.