What do you do in your current position?
Wizards of the Coast is a Washington-state based gaming company and division of Hasbro. I am in charge of building the website for Magic: The Gathering (magic.wizards.com) as well as managing a team of five contractors.
What are some of your past positions?
I did some internships at newspapers – The Trenton Times, the Princeton Packet papers. But right after college I ended up in a totally unrelated field (instructional design). Everyone loves a good copy editor. So I leveraged that to get some interesting jobs. Eventually I ended up at The Star-Ledger, where I did copy editing and layout.
I moved to the West Coast for reasons completely unrelated to my career and somehow found myself at Microsoft writing for MSN News (the website, not the TV station). That got me both writing experience and web design experience. By sheer luck, a year later, Wizards was looking for a copy editor with web design experience. I found myself building their Magic:The Gathering, website. So, now I’m an expert in web design.
Memories of serving on student media?
I took journalism as a minor because it was labeled “professional writing.” Then I had Journalism 101 with the legendary Bob Cole, who inspired, encouraged and, frankly, intimidated me into becoming a much better writer. For the class, we were required to write an article for The Signal. After my first article, I asked the News Editor if I could keep writing for him. I wanted to do it just to practice writing and get clips. But he eventually asked me to be his assistant. From there, I somehow ended up as Editor-in-Chief of the paper, a job that is much harder than anyone really gives those kids credit for.
Any advice for current students?
If you’re good with WordPress and Photoshop you can market yourself in a much broader range of fields. Copy editing is great, but it’s very limited. Be willing to work outside your desired field.You have to be willing to take some work that’s may be not the shiny, gleaming, perfect thing you imagined when you were in school.