Daria Degtyarenko, Marketing Communications Manager
Daria Degtyarenko, Marketing Communications Manager with Exactpro, talks about her work, her interests and the close connection between them.
– I joined Exacptro in 2014, and I am currently leading the newly created Marketing Communications branch of our Marketing department. For a pedagogical university graduate, it must not be the most obvious career choice, and it did take some traveling to get here.
Remembering my student years takes me back to my most favorite activity which was editing my own text analysis work. It went like this: first, we had to read an enigmatic short story by, let’s say, Flannery O’Connor. Then we went deeper in and extracted what the author had implied (or not?) in the text, all the while making our own story worth hearing. If it didn’t read well, I never felt like sharing it. To me, the form and the substance of the text have always been intertwined. The narration had to flow, the arguments had to be compelling and clear-cut, the emphasis had to be made in all the right places. I used to write on paper and cross things out or rewrite entire paragraphs, if that’s what needed to be done to get to the best result.
If you ask me how this reminiscing relates to my work, I’ll tell you that it pretty accurately describes what I do all day long, other than the fact that paper is now replaced with Google Docs. There are many nuances – both linguistic (explicit) and cultural (implicit) – in positioning a large company on the international arena. We encounter challenges every day, we edit, rewrite, re-edit, and so on until we get the version of the text that presents our product or service, or an event we are covering, in the most effective way.
They say that if you love your job, you don’t have to work a day in your life. I really can be engrossed in my work for hours on end. I am lucky to have a family too:) This, of course, is my husband and my son, who calls himself an ‘Exactpro baby’, more often while wrapping himself in our corporate merch:) We love spending time together: we travel, go on walks and simply enjoy being with each other, as all families should.
I also love making art, sewing for myself and my family, baking delicious cupcakes and, of course, learning. My latest achievement is graduating from the Data Science course at our corporate university. Everyone who graduated did so because we supported each other: it was a real test of our character, intelligence, and communication skills. In addition, it made me believe that it is not too late to start exploring new areas of knowledge, even after 30, even with a child and a 40+ hour work week, even as a person who did not consider herself particularly “technical”. After the course, I started contributing to the activities of our research department, which, by definition, is guaranteed to keep me moving forward.