Disclaimer: The views expressed by our interviewees are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of GradSimple. We only edit these responses for clarity. All opinions remain those of the interviewee.
- Name: Nila M.
- Year Of Graduation: 2024 (Bachelors), 2025 (Masters)
- College/University: Psychology with a minor in film, TV, and digital media (Bachelors), Applied Psychology (Masters)
- Major: UCLA (Bachelors), University of Southern California (Masters)
Why did you pick your major?
I picked psychology because I was debating between going the clinical psychology route or the business route. If I did business it would be hard for me to go into clinical psychology, whereas if I did psych I was sure I could apply it some way or another to business. Then I decided to minor in film, TV, and digital media because I wanted to learn more about the entertainment industry and how I could leverage my psych background in media. I loved both, but they were kind of two ends of the spectrum. For psych, all my courses were with premed students, and I was not really understanding that vibe or I couldn’t really relate to it. For my minor, everyone was wanting to be producers, directors, or screenwriters. I learned so much about the entertainment industry, but I was still not finding the midpoint I wanted.
In February of my senior year when everyone was talking about postgrad plans, I always knew I wanted to continue education. I just didn’t know what exactly it would be. I was considering law school and also doing a master’s. I was looking at different institutions and the programs they offer and I came across the Masters of Science in Applied Psychology, and when I learned about it more it was all about consumer and organizational psychology. It’s a pretty new field, but my program is all about how I can apply psychology to different industries and business in general. It goes into the consumer side and the organizational side.
The people who are doing the organizational emphasis want to go into change management, or leadership coaching, and for the people who want to go into the consumer side, there’s UX for tech, there’s the psychology of interactive media, consumer consulting, and brand strategy. So, I just thought that was more my vibe. I’ve been learning a lot, but it’s pretty intense and it’s very project-based. It’s giving me a lot to talk about in my interviews. It’s a lot of consulting projects.
Did you always know what you wanted to study? What was your mindset when preparing to enter university as an undergrad?
So, in high school, I was in Canada for the first three years and there was no community college route available. You either get into a good university or a bad university. I was kind of prepping for that mindset. My brother had even received his acceptance to all the Canadian universities, and then my family decided to move. I was in my senior year. My cousins had already gone the community college route and both ended up at really good schools: UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. They had gone through the experience for us and when we were telling our friends that we were going to community college, they were like, “What is that? Are you sure you’re going to be able to transfer?”
I met with my guidance counselor biweekly or even sometimes weekly just to make sure I had all my course requirements met and I was able to transfer properly. But again, when it came to the conversation of picking majors, that was definitely hard for me because I was very happy with my community college experience. Regardless, I was doing it online, so it would not have made too much of a difference. Community college gave me the space to try out different courses and pick one major. I took business courses and psych courses, but I ended up going the psych route and found out through my counselor that I could minor in whatever I wanted once I transferred. So I applied to as many schools as possible. I applied to all nine UC’s. I applied to Stanford too and was rejected, but I got into all the other schools. UCLA was my top. So, once I got in, I knew I wanted to go there.
How was your community college experience different from your university experience?
No one talks about how hard it is to get the courses you want. No one talks about how the lectures are so big and you’re just a fish in a huge ocean. It’s very hard to stand out. There are also clubs that you want to get involved with, but they’re pretty competitive to even get into. These are all things I didn’t know about. And as a transfer student, you only have two years. In the beginning, I started to apply to all these clubs. I just wanted to get involved as soon as I could. In my community college, I was pretty involved, too. Even though it was all online clubs, I was still the leader of the UNICEF club and She’s the First club. I always wanted to maximize the opportunities that I could get.
When it came to my UCLA experience, I went to the club fair and found some clubs that I was interested in. There was one called Business and Entertainment Club and I applied for leadership positions there. The summer before I went to UCLA, I actually got super lucky. I had the opportunity to intern at Snapchat. So starting at UCLA, I was pretty confident. I was like, “I have that on my resume. I can do anything!” Wrong. I applied to be on board for these clubs and I got rejected from all of them. That was very demotivating, but that was when I came across this club called USC Reach on TikTok. I thought, “Wait, do we have anything like it at UCLA?” I saw we didn’t, so I came home, went to my housemates, and I was like, “Guys, have you heard of this club? What if we started it here at UCLA?” They were on board. First we reached out to that organization and they were interested in expanding. Then we talked to our neighbors to see if we could form a group together. We did. And then, once we did that, we were able to start the club. By the time we graduated, we had grown it to over 200 members. It was all about bringing together the content creators and digital marketers on campus.
Even though I was a psych major and film, TV, and digital media minor, which were two ends of the spectrum, I think that club was kind of my midground, kind of applying what I was learning from psych and my major, but also learning all about the creator economy, and just the business of entertainment. So yeah, that’s what I did there, which was a pretty big part of my UCLA experience. I also was pretty involved with the Iranian student group and the Persian sorority. I did the social media for them which gave me a lot more experience.
Why did you decide to go to community college first rather than directly into a four-year school?
Coming as a senior to this country, I was very unfamiliar with the whole SAT process. Also, it was not only about doing the SAT, I also had to decide what major to do. Which schools would I even apply to? I think community college gave me that extra time to figure out these little questions…which are actually big questions. Also, you save so much money, but I just think I was shocked that not more people were considering this route.
Also, regardless of how you’ve performed in high school, it’s a new start. You have a new GPA, everything is new, and they provide you with so many resources. There’s this program called TAG which is Transfer Admission Guarantee where you basically see which school you want to transfer to and submit your community college and the transfer school, and it tells you all the courses you need to take and what grades you need to be able to transfer. Obviously it’s still competitive, but if you complete all of that, you have all the requirements for transferring. I highly recommend it.
I also think the community college route really helped when it came to applying to grad school and getting recommendation letters. It was really difficult for me to get them from my professors at UCLA because they didn’t know me well. I got good grades at UCLA, but when there are so many students, you don’t get to get to know them. And then when it comes to writing recommendation letters, they’re like, “Okay, I know you got a good grade, but I don’t know too much about you. How can I write a letter about you?” I was relying on my professors from my community college to help me with this.
If I asked you three years ago, what goals do you think you would have hoped to have achieved in life or career?
Going into UCLA, I did have some goals for myself. One was to have a leadership position within a club and another was to get good grades and be as involved as possible. If I could give one piece of advice, not that anyone should take my advice, but if I could give one piece of advice, it would be to always get involved with opportunities. I could have easily gone to community college, just commuted back and forth, and not gotten involved in any clubs. My school was online too, but I still made the effort to just join the Zoom meetings. It was literally just joining a Zoom call. I didn’t have to respond to anything or do much, but because no one else did it, I stood out.
When it came to leadership positions within clubs for my second year of community college, I never interviewed for any leadership position, they were like, “We’re leaving the community college, we’re graduating, and there’s not too many other students involved. Do you want to be the president of the UNICEF club? And do you want to be the vice president of this club?” That’s the thing. Showing up matters. It stands out. Even in my experience leading a club, I can tell which members are the ones that are attending events, and which ones are actually responding. I was dealing with 200 students, but some stood out because when you continuously make that effort, when you are present and continuously looking for more opportunities, people notice.
How do you “create experience” for yourself for your resume?
I was also raised in a very entrepreneurial mindset type of family. My brother’s just one year older than me and when he transferred to Berkeley, he started his own club. So maybe that was also my mindset. It’s like if I see my brother do it, I can also do it. Maybe if I hadn’t had that, that wouldn’t have been my go-to experience.
When we were in high school and we were in community college and we didn’t have much work experience, we started our own clothing brand. That was one of the first things on my resume. It was something that we started from scratch. It was like dropshipping so we didn’t even have inventory but we came up with designs. That’s also when I fell in love with marketing because when we created our launch video and our first marketing campaign, I loved the creativity within that. So, that created a great opportunity for me. And then when I applied to Snapchat, that was literally one of the only things on my resume other than my school work and my leadership positions within the school. That goes to show sometimes these big companies aren’t even looking for a filled resume. It’s just quality of work and passion and showing that you took a step towards something or took leadership of something.
I always say, never say no to yourself. Let others say no to you. Even applying to Snapchat with nothing on my resume was very bold of me. But I’d rather they reject me than say no to myself. Or when it came to starting the club, when I was thinking of emailing them and reaching out to the club, I was like, “Would they even allow it? There’s a rivalry between USC and UCLA. They wouldn’t even let us expand it.” But they said yes. So, let others say no to you.
How important is it to you to live a purpose-driven life? Do you think you’re on a path to do that?
That’s actually a great question because with the field that I’m going to, I’m not saving lives. It’s very marketing, media, and some may call it artificial. So, for me, I do wonder if I’ll lose meaning in this. But honestly, I’m still figuring that out as well. I do think it’s very important to have a purpose though. Even when we founded our clothing brand, we kind of revolved around Persian calligraphy on streetwear and it was focused on smoking and how it’s bad for you. In the Persian community, a lot of people smoke cigarettes and we were donating some proceeds to charities around cancer. So of course, it’s important to me to have purpose. As long as you feel good about what you’re doing and as long as you’re motivated I think that’s amazing.
What’s your biggest struggle right now?
When you go to law school you’re working to become a lawyer or when you go to med school you’re working to become a doctor. With a master’s, you get this new level of degree but I still need to find a job or start my own thing. It’s still a big question mark what I want to do after college and obviously, I’m going to apply to jobs, but it’s really a mix of luck and what’s out there right now. It’s also me again trusting the universe that I’m going to put my best foot forward. If I’m meant to come across an opportunity, I’ll take advantage of it, but will it work out for me? My biggest struggle right now is being in an intense graduate program, but also keeping in mind once I graduate in May, what my next steps will be. I have no clue.
What brings you happiness?
Definitely hanging out with friends. I’m a huge extrovert and I rely on social interaction for my energy. Studying is something that I usually do on my own, I can’t study in a group setting, but otherwise just spending time with friends and family is the best. I used to love watching movies, but I haven’t had the time to do that. It was actually very bad because I recently had an interview with this company and they’re an entertainment company and they were like, “So, what content do you consume now nowadays?” I had to tell them I didn’t have the time to consume much content recently, so we’ll see if it gets me to the next stage of the interview process.
If money and time weren’t an issue, what would you want to focus on?
Prioritizing my physical and mental health. I think I’ve lacked being present. Since the new year, I have been consistent with 1 hour of working out and 10 minutes of meditation daily. That was something that wasn’t in my daily routine but it’s something that I really need to do for myself. There’s always going to be something that you have to worry about, but I realized stress can actually lead to health deterioration. So, I need to handle that. Obviously I’m stressed, but it’s one thing to make your stress lead to your physical health being impacted. Oh, and I also love Zumba. I used to do it in Canada and hadn’t done it for multiple years, but I did a class last week and I actually got emotional because I just felt like I got my personality back. So hopefully I can do more of those classes because it’s just one hour. I also found these 10-minute meditations on YouTube, which is just an affirmation and music. So I’ve been doing that every day for the past five days. But I feel like every day that I do it, I actually end up having a good day.
If we traveled three years into the future of your life, what do you want to achieve or what do you hope you would see?
I really want to travel for work. I really hope in the career that I go into I’m traveling or at least it has some travel aspect to it. I’ve always wanted to also work abroad even if it’s for six months. I speak a bit of French because I’m Canadian, but I always wanted to perfect my French, and I think the only way I can do that is by living in France for a bit. I don’t have the opportunity to study abroad anymore, so it becomes working abroad.
I do want to get a good job postgrad, but I also don’t want to rush it because I do want to commit for at least a year to work in that position. I want to be in a space where I can learn from people higher in their career journeys. I just have so much learning to do. So I hope by that stage I’ve learned a lot more. I think as long as I have a good job that I genuinely enjoy, I’d be happy. I’d also love to help the Persian community in one way or another. I do want to work but also I want to have something else in the works with the Persian community because I’m very proud of where I come from.
Connect With Nila:
- LinkedIn: @nilamakhfi
- Instagram: @nilamakhfi
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