Melissa Herrera ’20

Less than two years after she was an intern herself, Melissa is helping guide the interns at DEKSIA, the Grand Rapids marketing firm where she works.

Less than two years after she was an intern herself, Melissa Herrera is helping guide the interns at DEKSIA, the Grand Rapids marketing firm where she works.

She said she can make a pretty good guess about which interns are communication majors by the “soft skills,” like teamwork and collaboration, that they bring to the job.

“Soft skills are something that not many students have when they enter internships. Now that I’ve had some interns, I can see that,” she said. “You can spot who was a comm major and who was not.”

Herrera majored in organizational communication with a minor in French, and graduated from Calvin in December 2020.

As a digital specialist at DEKSIA, she mainly focuses on SEO content writing, social media advertising and email marketing. A smaller part of her job involves “the other side of SEO,” she said, like link building and minor coding.

But she said it’s the soft skills she came away with from Calvin that are helping her excel at DEKSIA – skills like understanding how people work, leadership communication, and learning how to talk to your supervisor and your team.

A communication major isn’t like other majors, where students are learning a lot of technical skills, she said.

“They teach us how to observe and how to react, from building a message, to figuring out what the perfect audience is, to even just work relationships,” she said. “Even though it feels like you’re not learning anything technical, those softer skills actually help you go further and advance a little faster.”