From Memes to Medicine: My World in Digital Media

 

One of the sites I visit most often is Instagram. On the personal side, it’s my go-to for keeping up with friends, family, and the occasional rabbit hole of food videos. On the professional side, I manage the Instagram page for the healthcare department I work in. It’s a mix of storytelling, education, and making sure we’re putting out content that patients and the community actually want to see. Balancing personal memes with professional medical updates keeps things interesting—I have to admit, it’s a unique challenge switching from cat reels on my personal feed to posting about skin cancer screenings on the departmental page.

Overall, I enjoy using Instagram—it’s fun, engaging, and a great way to connect with different audiences. That said, I’ll be honest: creating reels can sometimes feel like running a triathlon with one shoelace untied. The tools are powerful, but making something polished can be more challenging than it looks. Still, I like pushing myself to learn new tricks and find creative ways to use the platform. Each time I figure out how to add a transition, sync music, or use trending audio without accidentally deleting my draft, I count it as a small victory.

Another application I use daily is WordPress, where I manage our department’s website. Compared to Instagram, WordPress feels like the quieter, more organized sibling—less flashy, but still incredibly important. The platform itself is fairly easy to use once you get the hang of it, but let’s just say my best friend for troubleshooting has become YouTube. I’ve watched countless tutorials on everything from embedding a video to adjusting a stubborn layout. YouTube has turned what could be frustrating roadblocks into opportunities for learning, and I’ve gained a lot of confidence by being able to troubleshoot issues on my own.

The truth is, I use digital media every single day—both personally and professionally. In my professional life, it actually makes up a large chunk of my day—about four to six hours daily. That time is spent updating our website, planning and scheduling content, and creating Instagram posts and reels for our audience. It’s become second nature to me, almost like another language I use to connect with others. 

When I step back and think about digital media in marketing today, the first word that comes to mind is: everywhere. It shows up in ways that are both subtle and not-so-subtle. Whether it’s influencers casually sipping a product on your feed, brands sliding into your DMs with promotions, or those paid ads that somehow know exactly what you just Googled (I see you, targeted marketing), digital media is impossible to avoid. What fascinates me is how seamlessly it’s become part of daily life—marketing isn’t just on billboards or in commercials anymore, it’s woven into the apps we scroll, the websites we browse, and even the conversations we have.

For me, that’s what makes studying marketing exciting. It’s not just about learning strategies in a classroom; it’s about noticing how they play out all around us, adapting them to different industries like healthcare, and finding clever ways to connect with people where they already are.