I work for Zynga as a Producer where I do project and product management for mobile games.
Location: Austin, TX
Discuss your general career path since graduating from UT.
After I graduated from UT, I moved to the Bay Area to work for Electronic Arts (EA). I was an intern over summer 2016 before being hired full-time in October. I worked there as a Project manager until I returned to Austin to work for Zynga.
How did your BDP experience influence your career path and interests?
I was an RTF major, but I was always more interested in video games instead of film or TV. The BDP experience allowed me to explore game development through the lenses of computer science and fine arts as well as RTF, which encouraged my interest in the industry and prepared me for a project management role, where I work with a variety of interdisciplinary specialists.
What do you value most about your BDP experience?
The combination of hands-on, project-based work and critical discourse on all things digital allowed me to actually develop games and websites while also considering their impact on people. The influence of digital media today is both ubiquitous and not widely understood; being able to think critically about my work in this space is invaluable.
In what ways did an interdisciplinary education prepare you for what you are currently doing?
As a project manager, I’m not really a specialist in anything, but I need to have a general understanding of how various technologies are used and be able to work with specialists in each of those fields. An interdisciplinary education allowed me to interface with all the roles in a technology project: designers, engineers, system architects, etc.