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Liz Kay
Hello and welcome to the Providence College Podcast. I'm your host, Liz Kaye, and I'm joined by producer Chris Jones of the Class of 2005 here in the Providence College Podcast. We bring you interesting stories from the Friar family. This week, we're talking with Katherine Moran, member of the Class of 2023 from Franklin, Massachusetts. Brian is a marketing major who just finished up an internship at a marketing firm in Providence.

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Liz Kay
She's also been figure skating for years and serves on the exact board of the college's figure skating club. Athens, great to talk to you today.

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Catherine Moran '23
Hi. Thank you for having me.

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Liz Kay
So tell us about your internship in the fall. Where were you working and what were you doing there?

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Catherine Moran '23
So I started actually in June at Trailblazer Marketing, and I was a growth marketing intern. So all through the summer, I worked with my advisor, Sam Reid, and I did a lot of sales kind of stuff. I worked on, like the HubSpot suite, did a bunch of stuff like that, and I liked it but didn't know if I necessarily wanted to continue with that in my career.

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Catherine Moran '23
And so I was given the opportunity to stay in the fall and work with a different person. Jay Weintraub And she kind of brought me into the creative side. So I did a lot of stuff with our Tick-Tock team and made a lot of content to use Canva, a lot in posting for ourselves and for different clients. And I kind of found that that was my passion and I like that a lot.

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Catherine Moran '23
So I'm looking for something after graduation in the digital marketing field, but I'm so happy that I was able to kind of narrow it down. You know, what I thought I wanted to do wasn't actually exactly right for me, but was able to figure it out.

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Liz Kay
Well, that sounds like a very happy outcome. You got to test the waters, see what was out there, and kind of refine and fine tune your your career ambitions. So how did you get connected with Trailblazer in the first place?

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Catherine Moran '23
So my internship application experience was not easy, to say the least. I found I was looking for something in the Providence area and living off campus knowing that I was going to have an apartment here. I don't live too far from here at home, so I was looking at the remote or close to home or here. There was not a whole lot in the area, so I'm pretty much just applying anything that I could find.

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Catherine Moran '23
And most things just never heard back or, you know, just didn't work out. And then I had some panicked conversations with test White from the business school, and she kind of asked me out and sent me different things. And I ended up applying for the internship at Trailblazer through Handshake and heard back within like a couple of days.

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Catherine Moran '23
They set up an interview and it was very quick and I think I joined like a week later.

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Liz Kay
So talk a little bit more about that. Tess is she's actually a member of the Chicago Career Education Center's team, but that's sort of embedded in the business school. Yeah, right. So she works with all kinds of business majors, helping them with their career journeys. So were you when you were struggling to apply, were you applying through handshake, which is kind of a repository of.

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Catherine Moran '23
Drive, interviewing everything, LinkedIn. Handshake, indeed. Like anything I could find, I was emailing people. I think that's kind of one of the good things. As a marketing major, I tried to do it in other classes too, but we in most of my classes, we have to do an assignment where will submit like an updated resumé or we'll have to do networking and we'll have to do interviews with people in the field that we want to be in.

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Catherine Moran '23
And we're like forced to make that extra step as a grade. So that definitely helped me just kind of putting my foot out there and like reaching out to anybody who would answer me. I was just like LinkedIn, DMS, just anybody. But that was super helpful. And you don't always hear back from everybody, but that's okay. And then so I was kind of hoping that I would find something through that, but it didn't really work out that way.

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Catherine Moran '23
So yeah, that's when I started meeting with Tess, which was like, okay, we can figure it out. And we didn't. It was great.

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Liz Kay
And this might seem counterintuitive, but what were you hoping to gain from an internship? Why were you looking for an internship last summer?

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Catherine Moran '23
So I actually was a business management major my freshman and sophomore year. So I switched to marketing the end of my sophomore year and I then didn't have an internship for that summer because I had just made the switch and really no idea what I wanted to do and kind of just missed the deadlines with that. So then going into senior year, I was like, Okay, I need some experience.

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Catherine Moran '23
I need to, you know, get into the working field. I need something on my resumé that's not like my summer job. So I knew I needed something and eventually found it.

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Liz Kay
So I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about how you came to Providence College, how province College was even on your radar in the first place.

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah. So I have any fryer since the time I was born. My mom was the class of 1989 and she is a diehard fryers and she tries to go to every basketball game that she can. So I growing up, you know, I was going to different sporting events constantly spending time with her friends and roommates and stuff from D.C..

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Catherine Moran '23
Those are still her best friends to this day. Yeah. And then three of her college roommates ended up having daughters within a year of each other. And her. So there's four of us and we all ended up at P.S. together. Two are graduated last year and two of us are graduating this year. And we've been best of friends since we were born.

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Catherine Moran '23
One of them lives in the same town as me, so we've always grown up super close birthday parties. Everything we spent together. I consider them my cousins.

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Liz Kay
I was just going to ask, So did you grow up near there? All of you kind of settle in Massachusetts or.

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Catherine Moran '23
Three of us are in Mass and one's in Rhode Island. So not.

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Liz Kay
So definitely. You can maintain that connection. Yeah. Like you basically grew up together. Yeah. And then found yourself in Chinatown.

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Catherine Moran '23
Yes. I was actually the last one to commit. I knew I wanted to come here. It was just. Oh, making the decision once. The other one in our grade. But it was like, okay, I can be the only one. I have to go. So yeah.

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Liz Kay
We were going to count that as positive pressure. Yes. Yeah.

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Catherine Moran '23
I knew I wanted to come here anyway, but I know there's.

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Liz Kay
Lots of students who are legacy students. We'd call them at Providence College. You have a parent or grandparent or sibling who've come to Brown College, but you really are following in your mother's footsteps because she was a marketing major, too.

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Catherine Moran '23
She was, yeah.

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Liz Kay
So how did you pick marketing ultimately?

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Catherine Moran '23
So yeah, I had started in business management. I didn't really know what I wanted to do and kind of coming in, I was like, okay, that seems like the most broad. Out of the four majors in the business school, I knew I didn't really want finance or accounting, but didn't really know what marketing was. And I was kind of like, I'm not creative enough for that.

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Catherine Moran '23
So I did business management was like, I'll figure it out. I'll start with this. And then once I took in sales marketing, it's like it's my second semester sophomore year. I was like, okay, I would definitely want to do this. This is more my thing. So I switched right away and I've been super happy ever since.

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Liz Kay
You're in your final semester now?

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah.

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Liz Kay
What have been some of the more memorable classes you've taken right now?

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Catherine Moran '23
Well, outside of the business, I haven't taken a whole lot other than, like, core classes and stuff. But for, like, an elective kind of things. I took American musical theater with Professor David Cabral my sophomore year online, and I loved it, but it was so much fun. I had never seen a music musical before in my life, which not a lot of people if.

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Liz Kay
You're the Hamilton generation. Yeah, I know.

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Catherine Moran '23
So I was totally out on a whim. I just needed something to take. And that was one of the only things a sophomore or the hard in some classes is with your schedule. And that was one of them. And now this semester I'm also taking history of costume and design with him and doing an independent study. So I had never taken a theater class or anything in high school and now it's like I'm thing to do.

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Liz Kay
So you had never seen a musical, You've never taken theater before, and then you found yourself in this class. What was it about this class that you enjoyed so much?

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Catherine Moran '23
I think it was just different for my other classes. It was, you know, not a whole I mean, there were no tests and stuff, but we would watch like a musical for homework. And then during class we would come back and talk about it and just kind of, you know, hear everybody else's descriptions and what they thought. And it was more of just like a big seminar rather than like, you know, watch this musical.

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Catherine Moran '23
I'm going to take a quiz on it or like, you know, write a paper, which we did write some papers, but they were more fun and like, interesting to me, especially on a topic that I didn't know that I was interested in.

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Liz Kay
And which musicals did you watch or which stand out in your mind?

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Catherine Moran '23
Well, yes, I never seen any. So we watched Kinky Boots. That was really good. And we got to watch a like live rendition of it in London online. But that was really good. Wicked. And then I ended up seeing Wicked this past Summer Live, and it was like incredible.

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Liz Kay
Did you see it at the Providence Performing Arts Center?

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Catherine Moran '23
No, I saw it in Boston with my mom and it was great. What else? We know some of them were even more obscure. There were some smaller ones. Some of them I personally was not a huge fan. Yeah, those two definitely stood out. Especially people, like, always talk about them. I think we did actually watch Hamilton, too.

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Liz Kay
And so that inspired you to continue to take lessons with Professor Brown? Yes. Yeah. And tell us about your independent study.

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Catherine Moran '23
So we actually haven't started it yet, but I had pretty much told I had taken it with one of my roommates at the time. And then we've told all of our roommates, like, you have to take this class. You have to take them as a professor, like, it's great. And then so at the time, he was thinking about doing a musical theater to class.

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Catherine Moran '23
So we had watched musicals going up to about like the twins. So he was going to make a second class with musicals from like 2000 to now, but there just wasn't enough interest. And then that would have to be a pre req or this class. So we're just doing an independent study into my roommates and it's kind of just the same thing.

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Catherine Moran '23
But with musicals that are a little more recent times.

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Liz Kay
So it was from your sophomore year on, are you like now belting out show tunes like, is this not silly and you're fired?

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Catherine Moran '23
No, not really. I really haven't watched a whole lot of musical. That's another thing to see, but definitely like a new appreciation for it.

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Liz Kay
I feel like this is a great segue way to start asking you about your skating. Yeah, because you are just a figure skater, but you have a very specialized form of figure skating. Tell us about that.

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah. So growing up, I did synchronized figure skating, so it's pretty much like synchronized swimming on ice. There's like eight six inch girls out there at once doing all the same thing. I did not like skating by myself from the time I was like, seven years old. I just didn't like it. So I was thrown into this by one of my coaches and I loved it.

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah, I did that through senior year of high school. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of opportunity with skating in college and the schools that I was looking at, Not a lot of them had synchro teams, so that kind of made it tricky. But I knew I still wanted to skated, still wanted to skate in some form. So I had two girls on my team for ABC and they were on the Exac board for our club here and they were like, Oh, like I know you're interested in the school like this, but you know, this is what we're doing at the time.

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Catherine Moran '23
They were cheering at hockey games and stuff, skating during intermissions. So I, we, I went with my mom to some of the games that we watched and I decided, you know what? This is good. This is exactly where I want to be. And it still has skating, even if it's not the same type. So, I mean, I'm still skating on a team too.

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Catherine Moran '23
It's not necessarily me alone, and I've met some of my best friends through it. I love it. And we practice two or three times a week in a competition. Next weekend. Yeah, it's great. It was a great transition from skating five, six days a week in high school, then something a little more low key, but still being able to get out there.

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Liz Kay
And have you yourself been out on the ice during hockey games? Are you not sharing your games?

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Catherine Moran '23
We don't anymore. It's convenience. But freshman year I was out there and it was a lot harder.

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Liz Kay
Until you've been skating since you were really young.

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Catherine Moran '23
Like, Yeah, yeah, almost 17 or so years now.

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Liz Kay
And what, what did you like about it? How did you get started?

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Catherine Moran '23
I don't know. My parents kind of just threw me into like a bunch of different sports. My dad played soccer growing up, so he just wanted me to be that soccer star. And I did not like it. I was the little kid, like, on the field, like in the grass. And so they put me in skating with like, some of my neighbors just learned to skate.

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Catherine Moran '23
We had like a pond near us. So they were like, All right, well, we'll put you in, learn to skate. You can learn how to skate on the pond next year or whatever. And yeah, I don't know. I just kept going with it and my neighbors kind of started dropping out and I just. You just. Yeah, I did.

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah. Kept going.

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Liz Kay
But it amazes me that as a synchronized figure skater that you like, showtunes were not part of the repertoire, like you were performing.

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Catherine Moran '23
So we totally did skate to Hairspray. We skated to Wicked. We'd get into a bunch of different musicals and I don't know why. So I like, knew some of the music, like watching the musicals. I'm like, okay, I know this. My only skated to this when I was younger, but I just have never seen it. I don't know.

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Liz Kay
It's just but it's whole. In your cultural exposure in life, like these musicals were just not. Yeah, like you didn't watch musical. I'm sorry to keep obsessing about this. How did you never see a musical?

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, I. My mom never really, like, was watching, and we never went to see shows or anything, But she's seen them. I don't know. It's just. It know. I don't know. I don't know. And I guess I didn't realize how like, weird that was until I took the class and everyone's like, Oh yeah, I've seen this, this and this.

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Catherine Moran '23
And I'm like, Oh no.

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Liz Kay
But like, even if you hadn't seen it in the theater, like, you know, they're, they're musical films, like.

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah, no, I had never, never seen them. No.

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Liz Kay
Well, very grateful. And Professor Kimbrough was able to rectify this. This void in your life. Yeah. And it clearly has made an impact on you. Yeah. Is there anything else that you would say really shaped your path at Providence?

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Catherine Moran '23
Or, like, I. I don't know. I would just say from the time that I committed here, I was just so excited to be here and seeing how much fun and like how much my mom loved the school. I was so excited to have a similar experience in my own way and it's totally lived up to it. I mean, it's definitely been hard having COVID in the middle of it.

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Catherine Moran '23
It kind of threw a wrench, but it kind of at the same time created. I met a lot of people through that. I did a lot of different things. I was actually remote one semester and lived with some of my friends elsewhere, and I never would have been able to do anything like that. Yeah, I don't know. I just as much as it was an unfortunate thing and still is, a lot came from it and I've learned a lot from it.

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Catherine Moran '23
And I think the school and the lit so well too. I have so many friends at other places and it was just so different. Our experiences and yeah, I, I prefer our yeah, I mean I love being here. I'm so, so sad. So sad to graduate where like I got the email this morning about like the legacy dinner, graduation weekend I call my mom and like, Oh, did you see the email?

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Catherine Moran '23
They're already planning, they're planning senior week stuff, but it's coming up. I ordered my cap and gown, so yeah, and I just live every moment.

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Liz Kay
So I think you also alluded to this a little bit earlier in the conversation, but so what are your thoughts for the time after concept?

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Catherine Moran '23
Yeah, so I'm just applying again, anything I can find networking. You know, I work with some professors and just trying to find anything that I can, trying to set up interviews and things. I'm yeah, I'm hoping to go into digital marketing after graduation, but we'll see. Yeah, just kind of in that application process again. And it's hard. But knowing how rewarding it was when I was looking for an internship this time last year, I'm hopeful and just keeping my eyes open.

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Liz Kay
Probably haunting just White's office again.

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Catherine Moran '23
Oh yeah, I probably. Okay.

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Liz Kay
Catherine, it's been so wonderful talking with you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

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Catherine Moran '23
Thank you for having me.

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Liz Kay
Subscribe to the Providence College Podcast in all the usual places, including iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play and Spotify, as well as your smart speaker, if you like. When you hear it, please review and share with others. Thanks for listening and variety.