Here’s how my software developer job prepared me for a master’s in journalism
By Avery Dews
When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan — Ann Arbor majoring in computer science, I was told that the possibilities from obtaining that degree were endless. The phrase “this is the skill set of the future” echoed from lecture halls and from advising offices from the time we enrolled in our intro courses until the moment we declared our majors. Nearly all of my peers spent their summers rotating between software companies and were rewarded handsomely with job offers at the start of our senior year.
I was not among them. My time at the University of Michigan was mostly spent avoiding the career office and cherishing the time I spent in my media studies courses, learning about the history and challenges facing the industries that shape so much of our lives. Invariably I would return from those classes to my engineering projects, which rarely had any semblance of meaningful human impact.
Perhaps I was at the wrong school, but I spent a lot of time wishing that there was a way to combine my love of media and human interaction with the technical skills I was developing. The curriculum didn’t seem to support both, and after I graduated I eventually took a job as a software engineer. I figured that, eventually, I could finesse my way into a media company through the engineering department, but even there I was afraid I would pigeonhole myself into a developer role and wouldn’t find the intersecting role that I most wanted.
A few years later, my friend Pat messaged me to suggest that I take a look at Northwestern’s MSJ program. I wasn’t sure if he was being completely serious, but I did. After a few more months and a trip to Evanston, I was accepted into the program. What drew me in was not only the opportunity to fulfill my secret desire to be a writer, but also the Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship specialization. The best way I can describe the specialization is not only studying but experiencing the intersection between business, media, technology, and users. I seemed to have found the possibilities that I hoped to find after I graduated.
The connections between computer science and media innovation and entrepreneurship
After spending the first quarter of the program learning how to be a journalist and discussing the numerous challenges that the ever-changing industry faces, we moved to San Francisco to spend the second quarter studying and experiencing that intersection in action. On Mondays and Tuesdays, we took classes on the Business of Innovation, Design Thinking and Research for Media products, and Mobile Web Development. In each class, we worked on projects that could eventually be turned into startups, while learning business and user design frameworks.
I thought it would be another quarter of learning everything from scratch, but I found that in each class there was some aspect of what I knew from being a software engineer that played a huge part in the course. In our Business of Innovation course, I was able to speak to emerging technologies and how they could be utilized within media products. My personal project was a platform to index and search news publications by location. Using my background in machine learning and computer vision, I was able to come up with a business plan for this venture that had the potential to become profitable and generate revenue for an underutilized asset that many publications have.
The connections didn’t stop there. In our Design Thinking and Research course, my partner and I worked with our client, the San Francisco Chronicle, to create an event series to generate more engagement with their local political coverage and increase their subscriber base. While this didn’t appear to have much to do with software engineering, I was able to use my knowledge of users and usability I gained at my previous roles to help drive the development of a political happy hour. In our Mobile Web Development course, I even learned a few new skills while creating a mobile app using jQuery and other front-end languages.
But the experience I had in San Francisco that tied it all together was my product management internship at BestReviews, a startup that reviews and compares consumer products. My main projects were to develop a plan to overhaul the user experience for the company’s content management tool for BestReviews’ editorial team and to conduct user research into why a recent redesign of their mobile site caused a drop in revenue. Having been a developer, I was able to act as a liaison between the BestReviews editorial team and the technical team that manages the back end of the content management tool. Even with the technical themes of the project, similar to the projects I worked on in my coursework, the center of the solution was people.
This centering of people, I found, was the key element of what was missing from my previous experiences. Through my MIE courses and internship, I found my niche. I was able to not only apply my technical skills — writing code and utilizing technology — to people-centered projects, but to also connect with others who have the same interest in shaping the future of media.
About the MSJ media innovation specialization
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