I’m Peyton Litberg-Frank, the new Chief Marketing Officer at TOGETHER! I’m originally from the suburbs of Los Angeles and now spend most of the year in DC as a junior at George Washington University, studying journalism and marketing. This is my first note to you in this role, and I wanted to start with something that doesn’t usually make it into a LinkedIn caption: how hard it was to get here, and how long I spent thinking I was behind.
A little over a year ago, I had an interview for an internship I was genuinely elated about. It felt like the one. The conversations went well, and the team kept telling me how excited they were to keep moving me through rounds. Naively, I let myself believe it was mine. A week later, I got the email. They’d gone with someone else, someone who’d already graduated and had a resume that made mine look thin by comparison.
That rejection didn’t happen once. For summer 2026 alone, I applied to more than 300 jobs and internships. Some I never heard back from. Some wanted more hours than I could give while still being a full-time student. Some were a commute I couldn’t make work. And some I got agonizingly close to, enough to hear “we loved talking to you so much” right before “we’ve decided to go another direction.”
I go to a school where ambition and pre-professional culture are the baseline. Everyone around me seemed to be interning somewhere with a name people recognized, in finance, in politics, in rooms I hadn’t found the door to yet. Some of my friends knew where they’d be spending next summer a full year in advance. I didn’t have that. I had a growing list of rejections and an overflowing Google folder of tailored cover letters.
So I stopped waiting for the “right” opportunity to say yes to me, and I started saying yes to the ones actually in front of me. Small roles. Unpaid work. I spent hours teaching myself things I couldn’t learn in a classroom, watching panel interviews of leaders I admired, and asking questions to anyone willing to speak with me. None of it looked impressive from the outside. All of it was building something.
I remember how excited I was just to get an interview with TOGETHER!. I had initially applied for a different, “lower-level” role, and every conversation with the team felt better than the last. So when they came back and told me the conversations had gone so well that they wanted to bring me on as CMO instead, not the role I’d originally been offered, I was ecstatic. I say this in the least braggadocious way possible, but this role has given me something most internships never could: the authority to build my own work, set my own schedule, and watch my ideas get heard and acted on immediately by a team that trusts me. The experience thus far has been incredibly personally rewarding, in a way I have felt in no place else.
Six months ago, I was applying to and getting rejected from companies so small I wasn’t even sure if they were real. Last week, I got a cold email from a manager at a large entertainment company, one of my actual dream places to work, and one I’d previously applied to and been rejected by, asking to set up a call to talk about my experience. Nothing about my timeline looked linear from the outside. But from the inside, it was all playing out exactly as it was meant to.
None of that happened on anyone else’s timeline. It happened on mine, built out of every rejection I took personally at the time and don’t regret for a second now.
If you’re in the middle of your own version of this, the applications that go nowhere, the interviews that end in “we’re going forth with other candidates,” the feeling that everyone around you already knows where they’re headed and you don’t, I need you to hear this: your timeline is not broken. It’s just individually yours. Every experience you’re collecting right now, the wins and the ones that sting, is creating something you can’t see the shape of yet.
That’s exactly the belief TOGETHER! is built on. We’re not interested in where you started or how “impressive” your resume looks today. We care about people who are willing to keep showing up, keep building, and keep leading even when nobody’s handing them the timeline they expected. Comparison will only ever tell you what you don’t have. Growth will tell you what you’re becoming.
If you believe in our mission, the Campus Leader Program is a low-pressure way to get real experience while building something that matters. It’s a flexible time commitment built around your semester, not the other way around. You’ll get hands-on practice recruiting members, hosting events, and putting your voice behind something bigger than a resume line, alongside real perks and recognition for the leaders who show up.
If that sounds like the community you want to build with, apply for the TOGETHER! Campus Leader Program → here