Tara Wilson graduated from Auburn in 1998 with a bachelor’s in business, and she is now the CEO of the Tara Wilson Agency. This company, since it’s creation in 2015, has become one of Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing firms and has partnered with big name brands like Samsung and Nike, but long before she became a CEO, Wilson was an undergraduate student at Auburn.
“Coming from an environment where you’ve always been really successful, where you had been the big fish in the small pond, and suddenly you’re a small fish in a big pond and you’re floundering, that can really challenge you,” Wilson said. “For me, that was my big challenge.”
Wilson said that during her freshman and sophomore years, she tried out for positions in numerous extracurricular activities at Auburn, and she was unable to get many of them.
“As a student, there are so many opportunities, and especially now for students, to compare yourself to everyone else,” Wilson said. “There were a lot of setbacks and what at the time I considered failures because some of the things I wanted to do on campus didn’t happen for me and that really shook my confidence in myself, in my ability as a leader.”
Wilson said that over time she was able to regain that confidence and find her place on campus. Wilson said that there are keys steps that a student can take to find confidence in themselves.
“I think it’s important to surround yourself with people who are like-minded, who believe in you and the goals that you have,” Wilson said. “I think it’s important to recognize that you are going to have setbacks, and things aren't always going to go as you would like them to, but you have to continue to press forward.”
Wilson said that failures like the ones she experienced on campus have helped her in the long run.
“I have learned, in my twenty plus years of being out of college, that setbacks have really great lessons in them,” Wilson said. “And if you can look at them after they’re over with and after the hurt and disappointment has faded, and look at them and see what kind of lessons you can learn, what did it teach you, how did it strengthen your character, I think you’re able to find silver linings in those things”
Wilson said it’s also important to remember that almost everyone on campus is dealing with the same struggles.
“I had the perception when I was in college that all my peers had it figured out, they knew what job they were going to get, what internship they were going to have,” Wilson said. “On the outside, they looked really successful, but after time went by, I figured out that my peers were just like me, we were all just winging it together, some just looked like they had it more together than others.”
Wilson said that it is good to find friends who will share with you their failures and setbacks and that one difference between her time in college and now is the existence of social media and its effects on society.
“There is this continuous ability to compare yourself to your peers and feel like you’re not measuring up,” Wilson said. “But we know that social media is a place where people really edit their lives, and most people only put their best foot forward be it their very most flattering photo of them self to their very best most flattering accomplishments, very few people on a continuous basis share their setbacks and their failures and their stumbles, and it is very easy to get caught up in thinking you’re the only one that’s experiencing those things.”
Lastly, Wilson said that it’s important for students to remember that no student will come out of college perfectly prepared to handle life after college.
“There’s no substitute for actually getting out and living,” Wilson said. “That is something that I think I didn’t hear enough as a student, it’s just about growth and development which takes time, it’s about aging and those things come over time, and I think there is this pressure on students to have answers upon graduation, and you’re not going to have all the answers, and you’re just going to have to go out and you have to live.”
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