A recent graduate of Cal State Long Beach, Matthew Tran made a career change from engineering to media in 2013 that changed his life: he now leverages his YouTube channel of over 61,000 subscribers to give valuable career advice to students. WayUp sat down with him to learn a bit more about what he’s learned through his videos and the hear his insights on preparing for the real world.
Tell us how you first got into social media.
My first job in media was my YouTube channel — at the time, it was a hobby more than a job. I created the channel because I saw that there was some widely accepted career knowledge that was clearly wrong (e.g. ‘Just go to college, and you’ll get a good job’).
P.S. Check out Matthew’s shout out to WayUp at 2:19 below!
What is the hardest part about managing your YouTube while working?
One of the worst parts about being YouTuber is putting tons of hours into a video and then see it barely get any views. The hardest part about managing a YouTube channel while working is balancing these 3 elements when making a video: 1. Make a video that I’m interested in making, 2. Make a video that the audience wants to see, 3. Make a video that’s time & cost effective.
What is the best piece of advice that you’ve ever received?
“Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.”
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” — both quotes from Napoleon Hill
These quotes are significant to me because they changed my perspective on negative things that happen to me. I was actually fired from all 3 engineering jobs that I had. The 1st 2 times I was devastated, but the 3rd time I was actually excited. I did fail, but I saw it as an opportunity to pursue a career in media, which I’m much happier with. I try to flip every mistake I make into a lesson and see the silver lining.
In an alternate universe, what career would you be doing?
This answer is going to sound a bit ridiculous but in an alternate universe, I’d be a professional mixed martial arts fighter. I do MMA as a hobby. I’ve had a few rough sparring matches, and that’s when I learned I could never do it as a profession. Getting hit in the face by an athletic individual is an unpleasant experience. The idea of professionally fighting really stresses me out, but a part of me wishes that I could handle it.
If you had to give one piece of advice to college students across the nation, what would it be?
College curriculum updates very slow compared to real life. You’ll likely learn a lot of outdated knowledge in your classes. It’s important to always be learning your specialization outside of class. Also, if you don’t enjoy learning your craft outside of class, you might be pursuing the wrong career.
What advice would you give to students who want to pursue YouTube as a career?
It’s not about what you want to make: it’s about what the audience wants to see. Eventually, YouTube will feel like a job because you learn what your audience wants to see and that supersedes what you want to make because otherwise you have no audience to watch your videos. Hook the audience in the 1st few seconds of the video. Cut out any fluff in the video. Make sure video titles generate curiosity but don’t sound like click bait. Ask yourself why your channel is better/different than other current channels.
If you do a channel where you’re in front of the camera, then you have to watch your videos. If you watch my videos from the beginning of my channel, you’ll notice that my public speaking as increased drastically over the years. It was hard to watch myself, but necessary, very necessary.
What advice would you give to graduating seniors who will be starting their first full-time job next year?
Dating and finding a good job have an uncanny resemblance. I would equate a 1st full-time job to a 1st relationship. You think you know what you want in a partner/job until you actually get that partner/job, and it’s not how you imagined it to be. Then you notice things that you’d want in a job/partner that you didn’t know were important to you. That’s why I think it’s important to not be picky with a first job because sometimes waiting for that perfect job means you’ll be unemployed for too long. Even if your 1st job in unrelated to what you want to do, you may learn skills there that will help you down the road.
