Start Early, Take Stock of Your Skills – Marketing Expert Urges COMSSAites

By Iman Aiyeola

Content Marketer, Oluwasegun Oyebode, has urged students to start exploring paths early and take stock of the skills they already have to grow professionally as undergraduates.

Oyebode, the Content Marketing Lead at Selar and a former vice president of the Mass Communication Students’ Association (MCSA), gave this advice as a guest speaker at the maiden academic symposium of the Communication and Media Studies Student Association (COMSSA), UNILAG, held on Thursday, September 25, 2025.

Titled “Career 101: Navigating The Job Market and Building Your Path While Still in School”, the symposium featured Oyebode drawing from his personal experience, as he guided the students with practical steps on building their professional paths as undergraduates. 

“It’s important to start with your skills and expand outward from there”, he explained. He advised constant practice, explaining that students should actively seek opportunities to put their skills to use.“If you find something you know you can do, it’s important to start practising it…find a way to put them out there,” he said.

The ex-MCSA VP emphasised the importance of students exploring fields and learning new skills to discover their interests. He suggested free online courses on platforms like Udemy and Hubspot Academy as an avenue to explore skills, noting that the range of options is limitless.

 “Enrol in them for the sake of finding out what exactly they are about. All of this is just deciding where you want to be and what path you want to follow. The options are limitless,” he advised.

He also cautioned against prioritising income over actual productivity. He clarified that in their early stages, students should seek opportunities that provide tangible proof of work and ownership, even if that brings little or no pay.  

“What you’re doing should give you the opportunity to do other things in the future. If you consistently chase things where you have no ownership, what you’ll find is that you don’t have the opportunity to do so because you have nothing to show for the work you’ve done, and you’d have to start building a portfolio from scratch,” he explained.

The symposium also featured a question-and-answer session, where students raised questions and concerns, which Oyebode answered with practical advice from his journey.

Answering a question on dealing with rejections, Oyebode advised students to brace themselves in preparation for the possibility of a rejection. 

“Separate yourself from the outcome. You’ve sent out the application; you do not control whether it’s accepted or not. Understand that whatever happens, happens.”, he said. 

He also reinforced the importance of consistent practice and pitching oneself to opportunities, using his career growth as an example: “ I didn’t just start and find myself here. It was step by step. The real work was in pitching, practising, and trying to scale up from there.”

First introduced by the 2024/2025 academic committee at the department level, the academic symposium has now become a faculty-wide program. The symposium highlights COMSSA’s commitment to creating a thriving academic environment.