1. What do you do?
Software developer by day, multimedia entrepreneur by night!
I'm a custom applications developer at Northside Hospital here in Atlanta, and I'm also a photographer/videographer/producer/designer for DS Studios, a multimedia creative agency that I co-founded with my partner and fellow IAC alum Doris Amouzou (MS HCI, 2023). It can definitely be hectic at times managing both roles, but as a computational media alum, achieving a technical full-time role and creative entrepreneurial pursuits has been a dream start to my career.
2. What's the coolest part of your job?
Northside Hospital is absolutely one of the coolest places to work in all of Georgia! The IT department is really one big family. Contributing to the No.1 leading birth center in the United States is a unique honor, and supporting Northside as they constantly expand their facilities and upgrade their tech stack has exposed me to many emerging and industry-leading software solutions.
In my photography work, I feel honored to be trusted by friends, family, students, creatives, professionals, and entrepreneurs of all walks of life to commemorate their life moments, promote their pursuits, and capture their confidence. Expanding from a photography service into a full-fledged creative agency that offers design, research, and production services now presents even more opportunities to tell stories, help people present themselves, and preserve their moments.
3. Why are you passionate about it?
I've loved computers since I was a toddler, so working in tech has always been the plan, and that definitely influenced my decision to attend Georgia Tech as a computational media major. As I grew older and developed my skill set, my love for computers matured alongside my love for reading, video games, film, music, and sports. Essentially, I realized how much I love storytelling and how the computer can be a powerful tool for harnessing multimodality in storytelling.
This may be more "obvious" in the creative space, but I've found there are stories to read and write as a software developer in healthcare, too:
- The "why" behind an application's development in response to a problem
- The "who" the application is meant to make more capable in their ability to offer treatment
- The various "whens" of the problem ("When did it start? When did it get bad enough to require a new solution? When does this solution need to be up and running by?")
- And, of course, the "how" to develop the actual application
Today, I see myself as a young and learning storyteller, eager to write my story while helping others write theirs.
4. Which skills from your IAC degree have helped you be successful in this career?
The hard skills I gained in the Ivan Allen College are immense and myriad. Intro to Game Design and Game Studio allowed me to pursue my original goal of game design while learning design principles like iterative design and scoping a problem space.
These design principles were reinforced in courses on visual, information, and interaction design, which also taught me data analysis and visualization, user interviews and personas, and graphic design. Classes on media and culture helped me become a more effective communicator by exposing me to literary activism, journalism, and ethnography. I learned how to analyze films and was even able to make my own in my Computational Media capstone.
The multimodality of my career frequently calls for me to think back and recall info I learned in these and other LMC classes, sometimes in ways I don't anticipate. The soft skills I learned from IAC are truly invaluable: project management, public speaking, team building, presentation styles, self-determination, and being able to think through any problem are fully emphasized in every IAC class, and those are the skills that are immediately applicable to any career path.
5. What's your #1 tip for students and alumni interested in your field?
Remember your why! Chances are that if you're looking into Computational Media and the many fields it can lead to, you have a sense of childlike wonder in you. You continue to draw inspiration from your childhood favorite books, games, films, and music, and you have a couple of wild dreams about how to make your own things in the same styles.
Perhaps you've also thought about how to uplift, inspire, and advocate for certain people and communities through your work in the same way you were uplifted, inspired, and advocated for by the works that impacted you. You've probably got several competing passions that make it difficult to narrow down long-term hobbies, let alone career pursuits. So allow yourself to explore everything! Appreciate every single learning opportunity that may come your way.
Computational media is interdisciplinary by nature, and it is uniquely the only undergraduate program at Georgia Tech offered by two Colleges — the Ivan Allen College and the College of Computing. Both of these Colleges are incredibly well-resourced, as is the city of Atlanta. Living in one of America's cultural centers and fastest-growing tech hubs while studying computational media means you'll almost certainly pick up new skills and be exposed to new ideas you weren't expecting.
You'll never know where each skill and idea will lead you, so enjoy all of them, and remember why you're doing what you do!
Meet more alumni in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication!
