Hello and welcome to my hand-coded website! My name is Daphne Yaman and I am a very passionate marketer and storyteller.
I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, by two wonderful Turkish immigrant parents. I was fortunate enough to attend a school that began teaching Spanish to its students in preschool, so I grew up speaking Turkish at home, Spanish at school, and English everywhere in between. For this reason, languages and language-learning are very close to my heart.
I have two younger sisters at home, and they mean the world to me! I am very close to my family, and have gotten closer since moving away for college.
I began attending the University of Southern California in Fall 2021, pursuing a bachelor's degree in journalism. I graduated in just three years, in May 2024. I was accepted into USC Marshall's M.S. in Marketing program halfway through my last year of my undergrad, and began taking my master's classes one week after graduation.
I am interested in a broad range of industries. My go-to is travel and tourism, as I was fortunate enough to grow up traveling. I was also able to add a fourth language — Korean — to my linguistic arsenal during my undergrad. I believe that travel is essential to becoming a well-rounded global citizen, and that the desire to travel is one of the best qualities a person can have. The more corners of the world I see, the more I learn about the world's history and human stories. It makes me feel like I'm a small part of something that's so much bigger than me, transcending time and geography.
I'm also very passionate about the English language and business communications. I am very persuasive and easily succeed in sales and advertising, and am full of creativity and innovation. I love finding different ways to solve a problem, and am always ready to act as a strategic consultant for any company or industry as I have in the past.
Apart from the above, I'm very passionate about writing and storytelling, hence why I chose my major. I think that words hold so much power, and the media has the potential to completely sway millions of people — a very powerful function. My investigative work showed me how much journalists are crunching numbers and analyzing mass sets of data behind the scenes. While my time as an editor at USC's student paper, The Daily Trojan, taught me about the joys of opinion pieces and their personalization, it's investigative work that really had a stronghold on me. I was able to change my friend's life after writing about his wrongful arrest by the LAPD.
In terms of other hobbies and interests, I am a very active person, and believe in the power of lifting at the gym as a means to empower women. I also love to read, and have a very detailed reading journal. As a creative, I love digital designing especially with applications like Adobe and Canva. I also love to give back to my community in any way I can!