Now, she’s a 16-time award-winning producer and a three-time Interactive Emmy recipient with a decade-long career spanning multiple industries, but at the time of her high school graduation, Shaquana Deas was lost.

A Brooklyn transplant in New Jersey, Deas and her family relocated in the middle of her high school career in hopes of settling into an environment more suitable for growing and advancing a life. But after she enrolled at Rancocas Valley Regional High School, Deas, a gifted student back in New York, found herself unhappy with her academic performance in her final two years after the stress of starting anew and adjusting to a different state caught up with her.

However, everything would improve at the outset of her associate degree at Rowan College at Burlington County.

“The curriculum and the professors at RCBC were amazing, just really, really supportive. I felt like I could go to school and not struggle so much,” Deas said. “I took a couple of classes that were just super compelling, super interesting, and I kid you not, I went from average grades to straight A’s in all of my classes for the entire two years.”

Along with her grade point average, Deas found her interest in writing for television and movies, which she dabbled in in high school, revitalized at RCBC. Suffice it to say that her transfer to Loyola-Marymount University, located in the heart of the U.S. film industry, Los Angeles, went off without a hitch.

As she completed her bachelor’s degree in screenwriting, she found her interest in it waning – “I don’t want to stand on set 16 hours a day,” she said. After college, she found something appealing in producing and marketing in showbiz instead. She first gained employment at smaller companies like celebrity news magazine Hollywood Life but later worked hard to earn a position at media behemoth HBO. Deas made significant marketing contributions to some of the most popular shows in the modern zeitgeist there, including Game of Thrones, Succession, Westworld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Developing content for companies of such levels requires paramount digital marketing, coding, and logistic know-how. Having to mainly learn after the fact of schooling, Deas took to honing these skills in various ways—ways that are different now than what she experienced before today’s significant evolution in technology and social media.

“I had to kind of learn on the job because that was kind of the only choice. If I didn’t learn on the job, I would be going to the library to look up books on how to enhance myself,” Deas said. “I would try to go to online classes; I would try to pull my mentors aside. But for students today, YouTube is invaluable. There are so many influencers and people who are already in the fields who can tell you what the day-to-day of jobs are, what skills they require, what the downfalls, pitfalls, and positives are.”

Deas has branched out even further after HBO, having spent time at Genius, Netflix, and Google. As of today, Deas applies her talents to Notion, a productivity and note-taking application for those looking to stay organized in today’s busy world. The app’s recent global campaign, ‘Think It. Make It.’, was Deas’ first endeavor with the company. Through the campaign, Deas and her team emphasized Notion’s mission: to provide the ultimate workspace for individuals and teams to write, organize, and play. It was launched in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, London, Berlin, Paris, Seoul, and Tokyo, taking Deas’ creative vision worldwide.

Reflecting on her lengthy but incredible journey, which started with uncertainty, Deas offers advice for those at RCBC who may find themselves in similar circumstances: “It’s such a difficult time and environment right now; it’s really hard to prepare a vision for what you want to do in the future. Jobs may not factor into what you want to do later. At every job you get, you can learn almost an invaluable skill that will play into what you want to do. Right out of college, just take those jobs, take them as learning experiences, and factor them into your dream job, which, if you prepare a vision, you’ll get to later.”