Carey Earle: Farming for Ideas and AU's Future
Carey Earle (SOC/'88) is the Chief Idea Farmer and owner of Green Apple Marketing based in Vermont. She's also an active graduate who has served as the President of American University Alumni Board. Carey was kind enough to take a few minutes to share with me a bit of her career story and reflect on her association with AU.
(Click here to isten to the entire 15 minute interview.)
After spending a year as a crisis counselor, Carey found that field wasn't for her, so she turned to marketing in New York City. The journalism courses she took at AU inspired her interest and taught her that "you could make money at writing" without having to be a famous novelist. She started out in advertising and developed a reputation as "the girl from Vermont," so she has carried that theme forward as her personal branding, naming her companies and even her current job title with a rural theme.
Carey got her first job in advertising through a referral from an AU professor. She had the opportunity to explore different marketing opportunities, but ultimately was bitten by the "entrepreneurial bug." The field is "dominated by women," she says, but women rarely rise to the top of the major agencies. She thought to herself that she could "do this on [her] own." At the same time, she was working with big names in the technology field, she made the leap to an Internet startup at the height of the Internet boom in 1996-1997.
Pulling these themes together, she became an independent internet marketing consultant for a couple of years, and ultimately started an agency with a partner called Harvest Communications. It was a boutique firm focused on financial services, providing advice to companies like American Express and Wachovia.
Today, Carey is back on her own and based in Vermont, though she travels frequently to her old stomping grounds in New York, as well as other venues around the country. She says her network is "still largely based" in New York, so like a good farmer, she tends to her crop. "For the first time in my life, I feel like I have the best of both worlds," she told me.
Her time heading up the AU Alumni Board can be traced back to when she first moved to New York and she was introduced to the head of the New York alumni chapter at the time. The two of them really clicked and "he treated me like I was his little sister," introducing Carey to a lot of people and getting her involved in the chapter activities.
Carey's tenure as Alumni Board President came at a turbulent time, coinciding with the challenging resignation of the former University president. She personally responded to thousands of emails and phone calls from fellow alumni. "They wanted to be heard," and she made sure that's exactly what she did. "I returned every message that she received," she told me. She also noted that President Neil Kerwin, then the interim head of the University, tried to make himself similarly accessible to the AU community.
Today, she couldn't be happier that Kerwin has assumed leadership of the University. The fact that he himself is an alum "meant a lot to me." "We are poised for even greater things ... it's a moment of pride for the entire AU community," she concluded.
Comments