Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.
Sometimes it’s good to go with the flow. Just ask Dublin graduate Kimberly Weber.
Weber graduated from Dublin High School in 2009 and went on to Texas A&M, where she majored in international studies and communications. She graduated in 2013, but wasn’t immediately sure what she wanted to do next.
“I thought that running away to Colorado for a few months would tell me what I was supposed to be doing,” she said.
Through some fellow Dublinites, the Heatons, Weber found a job working at a restaurant in Lake City, Colorado. “I bartended and did odd jobs around town,” she said.
The time off did help her find her path. She kept an eye out for jobs, and eventually stumbled across a digital marketing position in Houston for a software company called Reynolds & Reynolds. She had no experience, but decided to apply anyway.
Weber got the job, and moved to Houston. Her new job consisted of creating online advertisements for the company. “It’s not what I went to school for at all, but that was kind of the beginning of dipping my toes into a potential career,” she said.“It’s very interesting, and it’s something fun that I didn’t think I would ever end up doing. Sometimes careers find you in an unexpected way.”
In 2020, she transferred within the company to Ohio. A month later, the pandemic hit, and she found herself stuck at home alone in an unfamiliar place. She began looking for other jobs, and after seven years with Reynolds & Reynolds, she took a new job with an advertising company called Merkle, part of the fifth largest advertising agency network in the world.
“I’m currently doing a little bit of the same thing [I did at Reynolds & Reynolds], but on a bigger scale,” she said. “I currently work on the Albertsons business.”
Weber manages a team of around 20 people, creating online ads for Albertsons stores. She works completely remote. “I have an at home office setup with all the cool technology you could think of,” she said. “I log on around 9 am every morning and I have meetings, projects, and reports.”
The remote job allowed Weber to move to Illinois to live with her fiance, Ian, who Weber met through one of her work friends. They live in Rock Island, in an area called the Quad Cities. She and Ian are planning their wedding for this October.
“I like that I can take my job anywhere,” she said. “There’s not an office that I need to report to. If I want to I can go to the Chicago office and they’ll set me up for a couple of days. But if Ian and I decide that we want to pick up and move somewhere else, we have the freedom to do that.”
She sets her own schedule for the most part, and has unlimited paid time off. “Whenever I need to take a vacation or just take a day for myself I’m able to do that,” she said.
Weber plans on staying with her company for the foreseeable future. “I really like where I’m at right now,” she said. “I’ll be getting promoted to a senior manager within the next six months and just seeing how the company grows and develops from there. I don’t really have any plans to leave.”
When she’s not working, Weber enjoys gardening and growing indoor plants.
“We always had a vegetable garden growing up [outside of Dublin], and now that I have a house with a big backyard we’ve dabbled in planting our own vegetable garden and clearing out the flower beds — and I have so many houseplants,” she said.
She has a dog named Blue, and Ian has two bearded dragons named Pepper and Gravy. “They are honestly the cutest little guys ever,” she said.
Weber also enjoys reading. “Winters here in the Midwest last for about six months, so you get kind of stir crazy, you don’t have a lot of things to do,” she said. “I’ve been reading a lot in my free time.”
Weber’s parents, Michael and Lisa Weber, still live outside of Dublin.
Weber is happy with the life she has made for herself. “My inspiration has been just trying to figure out what’s actually going to make me happy, what’s going to cause me to thrive,” she said. “Ultimately, at the end of the day, the people that I love, the people that I invest in, and the people that invest in me back — they are my sole source of inspiration.”
She carries that inspiration into her career as well. “Managing people has been a very interesting experience, to say the least,” she said. “But I like to be a part of people’s growth. I like to be able to mentor them, and lead them in a way that’s going to cause them to thrive.”
Weber’s advice for Dublin graduates is to travel and experience many different places. “It doesn’t even have to be some big, expensive vacation,” she said. “Leave the state, or just go see like other parts of Texas. There’s so much that Texas has to offer. Texas is one of the most vast, diverse places full of so many different things to do, you don’t even have to leave Texas to experience new and different things… just talk to different people from different places.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.