Informational Interview 2

Mary Caroline Funk

1. What you learned about that person’s career path, job, field, education and the nature
of their work?
Rachel went to Clemson, was a communication major and focused on graphic design
and the adobe creative (Photoshop, illustrator, Lightroom, etc), and now is working for
herself at RachelAwtrey.com. Her husband travels for half the year, so working for
herself allows for her job to be remote and taken wherever is needed. She does
collaborations with different companies, photography for different companies and
herself, and free-lance graphic design.

2. How does a typical day or week unfold for them at work?

Her typical work week/day consists of collaborating with different companies, running
social media account, and marketing her social media account, as well as her podcast.
While collaborating with companies, she does graphic design for them, as well as
photography, and puts on events for those people.

3. What makes their career meaningful for them?

It is meaningful for her because she gets to do what she loves by helping people,
working with people, and use her creative side to create different logos and designs for
her company and other companies.

4. Which jobs or career steps preceded their current position?

Since she lives in California for 6 months out of the year, it is very difficult to have a
“normal” job. She then decided to create her own business, so that she could do what
she loves and have a job and get to travel with her husband.

5. What pieces of information/advice were most valuable for you (i.e. what you took away
from this experience)?
She told me about her graphic design for different companies and encouraged me to
continue to explore the different areas of adobe creative cloud and to start teaching
myself. A lot of companies need design and logos and will higher you to do them. She
said a lot of it was self-taught, which is encouraging.

6. How does this information impact you: does this job or field intrigue you or is it different
than you imagined? Does this sound like a possible area of interest for you or not; why?
I really liked hearing about graphic design. I hadn’t heard about that side of
communication yet from any of my previous informational interviews, so hearing about
where to start with that was really helpful

7. Did this position align with what you know about yourself: values, beliefs, personality
and interests?
 Yes, I have been following her blog for a while now, so this helped with knowing what
questions to ask her and knowing a lot about her business before I talked to her. Our
beliefs are similar and I love her blog.

8. Was this person a solid source of information for you? Did you sense that you had
similarities in terms of interests, values, beliefs or lifestyle expectations?
Yes. She was so willing to answer any questions, and after the interview, I am still
communicating with her to continue to learn about her career. I will see her this
summer in California, and I am excited to see what she does first hand and learn from
her.

9. What additional information do you want to find now after this experience?
I noticed Lynda has classes about the adobe creative cloud, so now after feeling
empowered by Rachel to teach myself, I want to start learning, so maybe I can go ahead
and start doing free-lance design on my own.