Ashley Pearlman had a reasonable list of answers to an unreasonable question. Teacher. Author. Food Network star. Later, lawyer, public relations professional, advertising account manager. Asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she could produce several candidates. Choosing just one was the difficulty. In the summer of 2015, with her final year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill approaching, she wrote about the problem in public.
There is a particular social pressure attached to that stage of life. An adult asks about your future with the apparent casualness of someone asking about lunch. You are expected to have a plan, preferably one that sounds sensible when repeated to another adult. Pearlman’s answer allowed for something more complicated: interests that overlapped, work she enjoyed, and a future she could not yet compress into a title.
Today, her title is Director of CEO Communications at Cisco. It is a tidy line for a professional biography. The earlier version of the story is more interesting because it preserves the untidiness. Before she worked on a chief executive’s communications, she was learning the language of a technology company and deciding whether she wanted to return.
A summer with an unfamiliar vocabulary
Her internship took her to Cisco’s Global Demand Center in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. Demand generation, account teams, revenue marketing: the assignment came with a vocabulary of its own. She admitted that understanding the terminology took time. Her response was practical. She asked questions, read and learned enough to explain the work with confidence by the end of the summer.
For a student considering communication as a profession, there is something useful about being temporarily unable to follow a conversation. Familiarity can make an explanation look clearer than it is. The newcomer encounters every unexplained term at full strength. Learning to understand a business is also a chance to notice how a business makes itself difficult to understand.
Pearlman’s account of that summer had enthusiasm, but it also had jokes. The possibility of a cooking-show audition remained available. So did a novel. The effect was to keep the career question at a human scale. A summer job could be exciting without becoming a solemn declaration about the next forty years.
“I like to talk and write. I like communicating with people.”Ashley Pearlman, 2015
That interest offered a more durable starting point than any single occupation on her list. Talking and writing can belong to a classroom, a newsroom, an advertising business or an executive office. A job title selects one arrangement of those activities. It need not exhaust everything a person likes doing.
Read that way, her uncertainty looks less like a failure to choose and more like an accurate description of the moment. She had acquired experience. She had discovered work she liked. She was still learning which parts might become a career. There was no reason all three developments had to finish on the same afternoon.
The offer arrived before the final answer
By November 2015, she had news. She had accepted a full-time offer from Cisco in late September, with an anticipated Marketing Project Specialist role in Research Triangle Park. Her return would follow graduation. In her update, she thanked the colleagues and fellow interns who had made the summer memorable, including their shared enthusiasm for the available food.
It is a small detail, and a useful one. People do not experience an employer solely through its organizational chart. A first workplace is also a collection of conversations, invitations and people willing to answer a question. Pearlman’s thank-you made those relationships part of the decision to return.
The offer solved a practical problem. It supplied somewhere to go after college. Her essay left the larger question open. She could accept the opportunity while continuing to consider what she wanted from work. That combination is easily lost in a retrospective biography, where the first internship tends to become the opening move of an elaborate strategy.
Here, the early writing makes that neat interpretation harder to sustain. She was explicit about still working things out. The decision was substantial enough to organize the following year around, and modest enough to leave room for discovery. An offer letter can do that much. Expecting it to settle an identity is rather a lot of additional paperwork.
Carolina blue, with opinions
There was one allegiance about which the college version of Pearlman sounded considerably more certain. In March 2016, she published a personal celebration of UNC. Her attachment had begun with a high-school visit for Journalism Day at Carroll Hall. She described the campus, the atmosphere of games and the rituals that turn a university into somewhere people feel they belong.
Her recollections included Franklin Street after a 2014 victory, the Old Well and the sound of the Bell Tower. Duke occupied the position that Duke usually occupies in an enthusiastic Tar Heel account. Anyone looking for carefully balanced institutional messaging had opened the wrong essay.
Those details matter because they allow the student to remain visible inside the later professional biography. People who make a living with language also use it to be partisan, sentimental and funny. The campus essay has the specificity of affection: a place, a color, familiar sounds. Its subject is belonging, expressed through things she actually remembered.
It also shows a writer choosing details an audience can recognize. An abstract declaration of school loyalty would have been shorter. The remembered scenes give that loyalty texture. The reader can understand the attachment even without sharing her preferred basketball team, which is a useful courtesy in a piece so otherwise disinclined toward sporting neutrality.
From her own next chapter to somebody else’s words
In April 2016, she laid out the immediate future: graduation in May, a Cisco start on August 1 and a move to Raleigh. The exact team assignment was still unsettled. She also had summer travel plans before work began. Her note sounded like a person preparing to leave college, with anticipation and attachment occupying the same page.
The career that followed took her through social media communications and, in 2019, into executive communications in Cisco’s CEO office. The change in audience is striking. A student essay can follow the writer’s curiosity wherever it leads. Executive communication has to serve a speaker, a business purpose and people who need to understand the message.
That makes the relationship between writer and voice unusually important. A successful sentence must be clear enough to carry an idea and natural enough to belong to the person delivering it. The work asks for judgment about what to emphasize, which details need explanation and where an audience is likely to lose the thread.
Correspondence. Employee news. Mainstage presentations.
Three forms of communication documented in Pearlman’s 2022 award profile.Her 2022 communications recognition gives concrete examples. In 2021, she led the development and execution of CEO keynotes for RSA and Cisco Partner Summit. She worked with stakeholders on the storyline and with creative colleagues on the visual treatment. She also led an employee-news video initiative, bringing information from different parts of Cisco into a more engaging format for company meetings.
These assignments share a problem: there is more information available than an audience can use at once. A writer has to select and arrange. A visual can help carry a difficult idea. A change of format can make familiar material easier to follow. The final presentation may appear straightforward precisely because the complicated choices happened earlier.
The audiences make those choices different. A security conference and a gathering of business partners do not arrive with identical interests. Employees bring another set of questions. Moving between those settings means considering what a message needs to accomplish each time, even when the speaker represents the same company.
That is the useful distance between a title and an assignment. “Communications” can sound like a single activity from outside. The documented projects involve writing, gathering material, working with colleagues and deciding how information should appear on a screen. The craft becomes easier to see when the individual tasks come into focus.
A beginning with room inside it
Ragan recognized Pearlman in the Rising Stars category of its 2022 Top Women in Communications Awards. Her subsequent roles included senior management in external communications and, later, the director position she now lists. The employer’s name stayed the same while the responsibilities changed.
The contrast with the student essays is appealing. They preserve a time when she could describe her interests more confidently than her destination. The later career gives that beginning a visible continuation, without making it necessary to pretend she had foreseen every step.
A person can learn a business, try a form of work, enjoy the people around her and still have questions. Pearlman’s early writing allowed all of that to be true together. Years later, the photo still catches two people in midair. The future, for the purposes of that particular frame, could wait until they landed.