Canadian Marketing Association Mentorship Program

The Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) organizes a “marketing mentorship program” with MBA schools across Canada. Rotman is one of said schools and I had the opportunity to get in involved in the program this year.

The name of the program is a bit of a misnomer though. When one thinks of a “mentorship” it is usually a relationship you have with someone who you look to for advice on various things over time. This program is not that. In this case you have to apply to the program and in your application, talk about the things you are interested in learning about/doing in the marketing world. If your application is successful, you are matched with a company that fits the interests you stated in your application. You (with a few other people from other MBA schools that are participating in the program) then spend at day at the matched company and meet their directors and learn about marketing (and business in general) at the company.

I am interested in working in marketing strategy and got set up with the agency, Carlson Marketing (soon to be AIMIA). I have absolutely no interest in working at an ad agency (which I thought Carlson Marketing was), ever. So you might think this would therefore be the worst day ever for me, right? Wrong! Luckily, the woman at Carlson Marketing that organized our day set up an amazing agenda for us. We had meetings with all of the leaders of the company, who were very experienced in areas unrelated to standard account services at an ad agency. So I had an opportunity to learn a ton, especially in the function I am most interested in, marketing strategy.

It is worth noting that some students do not get so lucky. Depending on who organizes your day and what company you visit, you might end up only meeting more junior people or company lifers who can’t shed insight on the world outside of their organization. So I was pretty happy I got to meet the people I did.

Because I was meeting such high-level people, it was almost like an unofficial job interview, as most networking events are. Like typical networking events, you should ask questions about the person, the company and industry but never straight up ask for jobs. However one of the other MBAers from another university who came on the site visit with us, was constantly asking everyone we met for jobs. Directly. Not cool, man! Also when we were asked to “tell me about yourself” it was very clear that my peers hadn’t prepared their stories specifically for our day at Carlson Marketing. However, anticipating we would be asked these sorts of questions, I prepared in advance and was ready to rock. Regardless of a lot of other drama that ensues with Rotman and its career services, it certainly does a VERY good job at helping us prepare for networking activities...