Meet Shelly: Professional Communicator

In this episode, Devon and Sarah-Jane chat with Shelly Totino, who eventually landed in the communications field after 4 attempts at postsecondary education (2 of which she actually completed!).

In this conversation, you'll hear Shelly's take on:

• The benefits of pursuing postsecondary education when you're not fresh out of high school
• Using networking to land cool jobs
• Using credit transfer to obtain more than one credential
• Being in a type of work that crosses industries fairly easily
• Whether or not AI will take away writing jobs
• Overcoming "sunk cost fallacy"

Resources:
Devon's chat about sunk cost fallacy on Your Career GPS.

Transcript

Welcome to The One About Careers with Devon and Sarah Jane. A career podcast for adults involved with teens navigating life after high school. We help you help your teens make informed education and career decisions by providing quality information and resources. Join us for weekly, bright -sized conversations covering various aspects of careers, including insights from professionals and different fields. - New episodes available every week at theoneaboutcareers.com.

- Thanks for joining us again on The One About Careers. We're doing a series of
interviews. I hate to say that word, 'cause that sounds so like formal. And the
last thing Devon and I are is formal. - Here's the answer. - We're having some
chats, chatting up some folks about what the heck they do in the world. So Devon, who's on the podcast today?
She's going to freak out and leave, dude. You can't say something like that. Hey,
she's got two young kids. Nothing's gonna freak her out. Fair. That's fair. So
today we're chatting with Shelly Totino, who is advisor, public education and
marketing for the Trillium Gift of Life Network, which is housed under Ontario
Health. And Shelly and I used to work together eons ago back in the day. How are
you, Shelly? - I'm good. Thanks for having me. - Thanks for coming. - I'm so excited
that you're here. Can you just start telling us what the heck you actually do?
- Sure, yeah. So I work for, as you said, Devon, Trillium Gift of Life Network,
which is the agency in Ontario that deals with organ donation,
organ and tissue donation. And I work for the public education and marketing team, which essentially is just there to try and build awareness about organ donation. We have marketing campaigns that we work on throughout the year. and then our big project is our Be a Donor Month in April to try and really push the message out there about why people should register to become a donor. So that's pretty much my job in a very high level nutshell, but I mostly do a lot of writing and marketing, copy editing, event for lots of different things.
- Cool, thanks. How did you get there from wherever you started?
These are the things that intrigued Devon and I. - Yes. - Tell us a little bit
about your career journey. - Okay, so I'll start it way at the beginning. So my
journey's been really, I would say anything but linear because it started in one
place, kind of did some zigzagging and then it kind of also ended in the place
where I wasn't sure I wanted it to go. So, right after high school,
I went to Ryerson, which is now TMU, Toronto Metropolis University.
No, Toronto Metropolitan University. There you go. And I took their radio and
television program. And so when I was 17, I was so young,
going off to university, I had applied to about five different universities.
I got scholarships for all of them except for Ryerson, and that's the one that I
took. But it was a bit of a sentimental decision because both of my grandparents
had gone to Ryerson. My grandfather had actually graduated from the same program that
I was accepted to. My grandmother was in the journalism program, so it just felt
like kismet to me. It felt really like the right choice, which I kind of realized
after two years, you don't pick your university based on what your parents or
grandparents did.
And I just felt like it was a really big school. I didn't really like how I was
a bit of a number. All my classmates were super, super passionate and into it.
And it was a big step kind of going from a smaller town to the big city and
commuting. And it was just a lot for me. So about two years in, I said, this
isn't for me. I'm gonna just step back and try something else. So I was looking
for a fresh start, and I was like, Hey, you know, you know, it'd be a great idea.
Let's do something completely the opposite. And I enrolled in police foundations,
which, you know, made no sense at all. But I had always been interested in
criminology, psychology, social, all of that stuff in high school. And I was like,
Well, this, this seems great. This is a great idea. And I discovered it was not
for me about, I would say eight months into the program during a very graphic class presentation on a double murder homicide. It was just, it was very gory,
not a big fan of that. And I thought, I think I'm more into like the theoretical
aspects of this then going into a practical career where I would be involved in
something like this. And so I took another step back and I thought,
well, maybe I'll try something that's a little bit more what I had been doing
before, that creativity, but not as scary, I would say. Radio and television seemed really scary to to me because it's a very cutthroat industry. You have to be very into it. And so I was like, okay, I've always loved photography. I'll go into the photography program. So this is now my third program that I've done in post -secondary. And I loved it. It was a great program for me. I finished it, thankfully.
And it was... - For all our listeners, that's just for the parents out there,
Devon and I aren't like, "Oh, good, you got a piece of paper, that's great."
- Yeah, exactly, but it was a really good experience for me because I had some
incredible professors. I was older, so I was able to really understand that what I
was doing, I was choosing to do. I wasn't just going to school because that was
what was expected of me. I had some agency in this decision.
And so I ended up after finishing this program,
getting a contract with one of my professors that I had met from the lighting,
I think it was my lighting class. And he was like, hey, he worked for Discovery
Channel. he was a director of photography, he said, "Hey, I have this contract in
October and I need someone to come and be my assistant. You'd be coming with me to
Europe." And I was like, "Shh, yeah." And get paid for it? And I got paid for it.
Devon, we're going back to school with the program. I'm questioning all my life
decisions right now. And So I joined him on this contract and it was like life
changing for me. It was for a TV show called Mighty Cruise Ships. If you're a
cruiser, definitely check this show out. There was three seasons I think and I
worked on quite a few of the episodes, but I just kind of just realized that there
was so much more out there than what I was looking at in school. And it's ironic
because this job that I got was exactly what I would have gotten if I continued my
radio and television program, but I didn't. And I actually probably wouldn't have
gotten that opportunity had I not dropped out of Ryerson and then police foundations
and gone on to photography. So it was a really neat little moment there,
but I did that for about three years. I worked on a bunch of episodes for that. I
was, I went to Germany and went to the European Space Agency and was there for the
Rosetta and Filet lander. And that was for Daily Planet.
And then I think I filmed like one episode that never got aired of Mighty Planes.
but it was an incredible experience like I was able to travel to South America to
Europe to Asia. I think I've been to like 26 or 27 countries just working for
Discovery Channel and I had some really neat experiences that I never would have
gotten but you know all things kind of come to an end and I realize that you
can't do that forever. And if you want to settle down and have a family, which was
something I did want to do, I couldn't do that forever,
going off and just jet setting. So at this point, I decided to go back to school
again, and I finally finished a degree in communications. And I had been able to
apply a lot of my credits from previous post -secondary to finish the degree and
that's how I got into communications. And since then I worked for a couple of
different organizations, a private members club in Toronto. I worked for a post
-secondary, two post -secondary institutions and then now I'm at Ontario Health. So
very interesting kind of zigzag pathway, but That's how I got to where I am now.
- And it's funny when I started putting calls out for guests and stuff, one of the
biggest comments I got from people was about, like, oh, while my career path hasn't
been very traditional or has me really linear, it has me right. And it's like the
fact that literally every person has said that would tell you that perhaps nobody's
career path is very linear. - Exactly, yeah. - Crazy idea to throw out there. - Yeah.
- What would you say is maybe something you like best about your work and something
you wish you could change about your work. - I love the versatility of
communications, especially when it comes to storytelling. Every industry,
every field, every organization needs a communicator, someone who can synthesize what
it is that they do in a really concise way and make that whoever their their
target audience is or their consumer is is able to understand that. So like moving
from the post -secondary education sector to healthcare was really seamless. It's not
something that would be seamless for really anyone else moving from one field to
another field but because communications is very,
it just has that ability to span multiple fields and industries,
I was able to do it really easily. And I love that my future is wide open because
of that. Like I could go to any kind of organization or work in tech or go to
the nonprofit sector, really at any point, and I wouldn't have too much trouble
doing that. And then did you ask what I dislike about it? - Yeah. - Yeah,
there's not actually a lot that I dislike. I would say sometimes there's,
when you're in any kind of role
where you're writing a lot, I find that sometimes leadership doesn't see the value
in communications, They don't see the value in proper spelling and grammar and style
and the rules that you have to follow to be a good communicator. And so you
sometimes come up against these personalities that don't see the value in what you're
doing. So you kind of have to prove to them that it's important or for me, I just
tend to ignore those kind of roles and I don't go to jobs without formal
communications departments.
Awesome. I'm going to go off script because I think this is timely.
What's your sense of how AI is going to impact your future,
I would say. So this is interesting. I love AI. I think it is so helpful in,
like For me, if I don't have knowledge of something, especially in healthcare,
I can input it right into chatGPT or Copilot and say, "Can you explain this to
me in layman's terms?" It puts me at a better advantage when I go through it
again, and then I have to figure out how I can communicate that to whoever my
audience is. I think it's very, very helpful and it's a tool like you're not going
to go in and take what AI is saying point blank because it's not going to be
accurate. You have to be able to edit it. You have to be able to take it with a
grain of salt and also it's general artificial intelligence. That's the difference.
It's not specialized. It's not a super intelligence. It's general. So For me,
I very much see it as a tool. I don't have any worry whatsoever that it's gonna
replace me because I think that it's just not as good as people think it is at
doing my job. Maybe one day that might happen, but you still need people who can write the prompts. And how are you gonna prompt it without a human,
right? So for me, that's kind of my view on AI for now. We'll see how things net
out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate that. Yeah. If you think back to,
like, when you were 15 and you were in your first course, what career did you want
at that point? Oh, I, like, fully thought I was going to be a journalist. I felt
like, you know, I was going to be that hard -hitting news journalist. I was going
to be doing things that were very noble in my mind, and those are just not the
stories that I'm interested in telling these days. It's just not, especially with the
way that journalism is going, I'm not built for that. So for me,
I'm happy with where I am, and I think past me, 15 -year -old me,
would be as well. Awesome. That kind of us to to our last question is knowing what
you know now. What advice would you give to your teenage self? Yeah, you know what?
I used to feel guilty about dropping out of programs and that sunk cost fallacy is
really hard to shake when you're looking at how much you've put in already and now
you have to figure out what you're going to do next and if if it's gonna be worth
it. But for me, despite that, I think the advice I would give is just don't be
afraid to try everything and don't be afraid to quit something if it's not working
for you. Like if you've given it your best shot and it just does not feel right
to you, trust your instinct, trust your gut, don't waste any more time. My mom
always says to me that all education is good education and 100 % she's right.
I have every single part of my journey, I have used in some way in my career and
will continue to use. And that journey really laid a great foundation for me to
become a good communicator because I was able to see things from just different
perspectives. I was able um have different experiences that someone who maybe just
did one program would have um and it's just been really invaluable to my career so
I would say just just try everything have fun with it who cares what you're
supposed to do in 10 years like just enjoy yourself you're only young months soon
you'll have two kids and be really tired
Yeah, yeah, we've been there We've been there you'll survive it. It'll be great.
Yeah. Um, I love all education is good education I always say that too. Your your
mom could could you know join me in my business if she wants her that's That is
an absolutely terrific piece of advice. Well, thank you so much. Shelly for joining
us today and sharing your story um, and Yeah, we'll uh,
we'll be back vaccine with another episode of the One About Careers and we'll keep
exploring different career paths and journeys.
Thanks for listening to the One About Careers podcast. You can catch up with past
episodes at theoneaboutcareers .com. Join us next week for another bite -sized
conversation.