SocialJ Assignment 1: Passion is my Driver
It’s so funny to think that I ended up here at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism and the SocialJ program because of a tweet. It was February 1st, I was sitting at my social work internship scrolling on my phone and waiting for my supervisor to come in, late as usual. There had been pressure for months from my professors in my bachelors program to apply to the masters program, yet I hadn’t even touched the application or supplements. A word document stayed empty on my computer titled, “MSW Personal Statement”. Twice a week, I would open this document, stare at it, and close it. For someone who had studied social work for 2 years now, I just couldn’t verbalize my passion for it anymore, and sometimes, I couldn’t even remember if I even had passion for it.
So I did as any 21 year old college student would do and go immediately to social media for the answer, I tweeted to an audience of 5,500+ on Twitter, “How do I break it to my mom that I dont want to apply to my masters program?” and maybe 5 minutes after, I had a reply from a friend who said, “Why don’t you just find a program in what you want?”
But the road to that moment was a long one.
Gaming for me started as just a fan thing, I had all the consoles from birth to even now. I was always playing games when I shouldn’t have, like family events, 4am on a school night, and 8pm with homework due the next day. I started going to tournaments with my friends at the end of my senior year of high school, competing, losing while they were winning, and then doing it again because it was fun to me. I had met and gained more friends from about 2 months of competing that I had met in 12 years of grade school. Once going to college and moving far away from the people that I had befriended, I felt myself slip emotionally. I was lost without competing. Video calls with friends wasn’t the same as seeing them in person. After my first semester of school, I packed my stuff up and moved to New York City to be in the center of the gaming world on the East Coast. In doing that though, I had also transferred to a much harder school for my undergraduate degree.
Some days and nights after tirelessly working on papers and projects, I would go to a little basement in the Lower East Side and play my favorite game, Super Smash Bros. Melee, with about 20–25 other people. This little hole in the wall with a disgusting bathroom, mustard yellow and Burgundy walls, and broken chairs was my personal paradise. I began helping out more and even started helping the tournament organizers run the tournament.
From helping run tournaments with 20 people to helping run tournaments with 1500 people all across the country, I was infatuated with the community that I essentially grew up in. By this time in my life, I had traveled to Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan, Las Vegas, California, Illinois, and two major cities in Canada just to play this game with people and help run tournaments. All while taking 15 credits a semester in college.
I started speaking on panels about being a woman in this crazy gaming world. I started networking with gaming companies, and joined gaming charity groups that raised hundreds and thousands dollars for some of the world’s largest charities by just playing video games. In just a couple years, I had culminated a following of over 5,000 on Twitter, 1,000 Facebook friends, and I even started my own Twitch channel in June of 2017 and gained over 1,400 followers in my first year of streaming just me playing games for an audience online.
When it came to my major program in my Junior year, I felt that emotional decline again. I originally wanted to be a therapist straight out of high school, and when I got into my Bachelors of Social Work program, I was initially elated. For the first semester or two, I was soaring in school. But after working in an internship that offered me nothing in the end except for a good few meals, I didn’t have passion for school anymore, I felt like I had given up what I loved to just work for free and go to class. I slowly stopped attending the weekly tournaments, people asked me where I had been, I didn’t have the energy to get infront of my Twitch community and entertain them, I was miserable by the time my senior year came. I was going to class in my pajamas, I was handing in homework half done and late just because I didn’t even want to do it anymore. But it all led me to that fated day when I applied to this journalism school and I made the decision to miss the deadline for applications for the Masters of Social Work.
And here I am.
So what now?
Social J has a huge emphasis on the concept of community engagement and that’s what I was essentially doing for the past 4 years of my life. I want to work at Twitch, the website that now is essentially my full time job, doing community management and engagement for them because anything with engineering or programming is a foreign language in my brain. If not Twitch, then anywhere in gaming, doing anything that will keep a roof over my head and food on the table.
Social J also excites me because of the continued community work. The gaming community is growing at a rapid rate and is exploding in front of the eyes of billions. I just want to learn more about gamers. I want to report on gaming places, people, stories, and even getting into the business of gaming, because it’s a big one, estimated at over a billion dollars.
I’m excited to talk my classmates’ ears off about this topic, and in the end, I hope some people find some happiness and joy in gaming too. But maybe not as much happiness as I do.
