Dev Catalyst Alumni Spotlight: Shelby Larson

“Truly, honestly, being in Dev Catalyst really changed the game for me,” says Shelby Larson, senior marketing major with a digital marketing concentration from University of Alabama in Huntsville.

I can’t help but be amazed by the truth of her words as she chats with me over the computer and a two-hour time difference, sitting from an office space in Arizona on a business trip for her very own company. 

“This is my first business trip that I've ever been on, and it's for my own company, which is really cool to say at 21, I get to do that,” she says with a smile on her face. 

Her company, a defense contract marketing company called HUNTSVILLE.IO, was created after her and a friend noticed a gap that had not been filled before, and she says it’s exciting to see her company continue to grow and develop as time goes on. 

While learning how to be a business owner, she also spends her time as a marketing intern for a Huntsville-based company, Tribal App, whose mission is to help leaders understand and harness the power of storytelling within their organizations, but business and online marketing was not her original dream when she started coding in high school.

“When I came out of high school with all this knowledge of coding, I thought I wanted to be a graphic designer, but [once starting college,] I realized that is not what I wanted to do,” Larson says. “But I found that no matter if you think you're going to go into a career in coding or not, that knowledge is still really helpful because I obviously didn't think I was going to start a business in high school either.”

She says along with the skills she learned in Dev Catalyst, the San Francisco trip was such a pivotal and unforgettable experience in more ways than one.  

“That was the first time I ever flew on a plane, so that was an interesting experience either way,” Larson says with a laugh. “But being able to go to these environments and seeing these professionals embody what I wanted to be was just so amazing because I grew up in small-town Tennessee and had never gotten to see an environment with all these like-minded people, and it gave me a picture of my goals, which was really crazy for me.” 

She says when she returned, it gave her a deeper motivation to work harder and to be one of those professionals one day, and she has seen these skills and lessons impact her life in ways she could have never imagined. 

“I have on my resume that I won those little Dev Cat awards, and that is always the biggest talking points of my resume,” she says. “Everyone wants to know about it, and that is truly, 100 percent, what sets me apart—having those experiences and having that knowledge.”