Medill MICS specialization “set me up for success,” alumni say
Five graduates explain how the Media Innovation & Content Strategy master’s program opened doors and created new career opportunities
Five groups of master’s students have graduated from the Medill School’s Media Innovation & Content Strategy specialization — and it’s been great to see the fascinating career paths they’ve pursued.
Last month I was excited to catch up with five MICS alumni who participated in an online panel discussion for prospective students. They shared thoughts about their Medill experiences and explained how what they learned has translated into their work since graduation.
The MICS specialization prepares students for opportunities at the intersection of content/storytelling, audience understanding, technology and business.
The alums on the panel have gone in different directions, but all of them are working in roles that fit that description.
The curriculum includes three months taking classes in San Francisco, as well as a part-time internship with a media or tech company.
A video recording of the panel is available. Comments from the five panelists have been lightly edited for clarity.
Mengyi “Jenny” Sun (MSJ ‘17), product manager, YouTube
Jenny majored in journalism at the University of Southern California and worked after graduation as a documentary producer and a TV reporter in Los Angeles.
“I was really enjoying my job, but also at the same time, I saw that the TV industry was changing. People were no longer watching traditional media, and all of the media were trying to find a way to pivot.”
She decided to join the very first cohort in the Medill specialization, which was then called Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
“I didn’t know what I was going to learn. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had never heard the term ‘product manager’ before I joined the program, and I knew nothing about tech.”
Jenny got exposed to product development through Medill’s Knight Lab Studio courses. She got a job after graduation as a product manager at eBay and then moved to Google, where she worked initially for YouTube. Earlier this year, she was transferred to a team focusing on augmented reality.
Tell us about your current job — maybe a typical day
“As a product manager, my job has two parts. One part is planning, one part is execution. Planning usually happens at the end of the quarter or the end of the year — we need to figure out what is the next big thing we’re going to build, what is the strategy, what are users’ potential needs.
“We look at user needs and data to plan how we’re going to allocate our resources to build greater value for our users for the long run.
“Additionally, I work on execution. Now that we have the plan, we need to figure out how we are going to execute the plan on a day to day basis.”
Execution includes collaborating with engineers to prioritize product features, working with designers to design the product user experience, and interacting with Google’s legal, privacy and marketing teams, she said.
“You keep on communicating, leveraging your journalism skills to talk with people, listen to them, understand them and bridge the gaps.”
What experiences, courses and people did you encounter at Medill that influenced your career direction?
“I loved the courses when we learned about business, technology, UX research and design, and audience development. Those were really new and fascinating to me.”
“Throughout the program, I was taking different courses to figure out what I was interested in. ” she said. “It’s important to figure out what you want.”
Jenny advised prospective students to take advantage of the Northwestern and Medill alumni network. The job opportunity at eBay came about through a Northwestern connection.
“Professors often invite alumni from different industries to talk about their experiences.” she said. “Make sure you chat with them, ask what they do in their career, and build connections.”
How do you use storytelling in your current profession?
“I use it every day. When you have a vision for where the product needs to be going, you need to be able to tell a story to your peers — to motivate engineers and cross-functional partners, to go in the same direction. You need storytelling to communicate up to your VPs and CEO to get their buy-in to your vision, and how it can make an impact on the company and to its users.
“Storytelling is critical for users as well. In tech companies, engineers are really good at building the code and the tech, while product managers are good at telling stories and engaging with users.”
Isabel Miller-Bottome (MSJ ‘19), content designer, Meta
Isabel, a graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara, moved to France after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in literature and creative writing.
“I was a freelance travel writer and wanted to be a journalist, and then I ended up spending a couple years at an ad tech company, where I was essentially an account manager,” she said. “I went to Medill because I wanted to get more training in journalism, and basically move back to Europe and be an international correspondent and reporter.”
Through the media innovation specialization, “I ended up realizing that UX design and content strategy really excited me and interested me more than the more traditional reporting. I was recruited by Facebook, which is now called Meta.”
Tell us about your current job — maybe a typical day
“As a content designer at Meta, I work on our ads and business products — so basically the tools that regular people or businesses or agencies use to advertise on Facebook. I work really closely with a product designer, who is in charge of the visual components, and engineers and researchers to make sure that we’re solving the pain points of our users. I work really closely with the product manager. We just all collaborate super closely to try to launch new features and improvements to all of our ads and business products.
“Very little of my day is spent actually writing, but a lot of it is thinking about words and thinking about messaging and content strategy, which is the bulk of what we do.”
What experiences, courses and people did you encounter at Medill that influenced your career direction?
“I feel like the whole program just really set me up for success, especially the design thinking courses, and the ‘design for local news’ project that we did with the Knight Lab. They were both really challenging for me, and very ambiguous. It felt like our team was trying to build something out of nothing and put everyone’s perspectives together.
“There was a lot of friction, but that experience came in so handy in the job I have now. And in my job interviews. I could talk about what it’s like to collaborate with others and to really deliver something to the finish line when you’re starting from, [nothing more than] user quotes on a whiteboard.”
Isabel also took more traditional journalism courses at Medill, including video documentary production.
“I love really amazing storytelling and features. Learning at a dissected, concrete level, what makes a good story and what makes a narrative — I feel like I use that all the time just building presentations, pitching ideas at work, communicating a vision. That’s something we do all the time.”
Tell us about your San Francisco experience
“A lot of people have certain ideas about the Bay Area and what San Francisco is like. Just having the opportunity to actually live here is so different from visiting. So I think it’s super valuable just for that alone and to see if you like the culture here, and if the opportunities here excite you. And then if you don’t like it, obviously, you didn’t commit to moving here.
“But additionally it’s a great way to just bond with the group that you’re with, and form those connections that will be helping you find jobs after graduation and you know that you’ll be keeping in touch with along the way.”
Wuqiu Sun (MSJ ‘19), senior marketing analyst, Candid
After graduation from Boston University with a degree in film and television, Wuqiu worked on content creation for traditional media in the United States, Singapore and China.
“It was my childhood dream, pretty much, but I realized that my colleagues were all at least 20 years older than me, and the advertising money was flowing quickly to the digital marketing world. That’s when I realized I needed a career pivot.
“But I also wanted to bring my reporting skillset to a new career path, and that’s why I chose Medill — but I had not necessarily made the decision of what exact career path to pursue.
“UI/UX [user interface / user experience], product management, content strategy, marketing analytics — those were all potential fields that I thought about when I was going through the program. In the third quarter, I got to explore a lot of options and was able to enhance my analytical skills a lot. I have been working in the marketing data analytics field ever since.”
Candid, Wuqiu’s current company, is a digital platform focusing on oral/dental health.
Tell us about your current job — maybe a typical day
“My day is really a hybrid between marketing — which is launching campaigns, working closely with Facebook and Google ad platforms — and analyzing data, talking to stakeholders, gathering requirements, figuring out their reporting needs, enabling the data to be analyzed in a visualization tool, and supporting their decisions with data findings.
“There’s a lot of code-writing through SQL, which I didn’t expect before coming to Medill, but it is pretty easy to learn. I did get the beginning of my SQL experience in my third quarter at Medill.”
What experiences, courses and people did you encounter at Medill that influenced your career direction?
“I really liked Audience Development & Analytics,” a course in which students use Google Analytics and email analytics to recommend audience engagement strategies for news websites, she said.
“For that year, we were working with real data from The Chicago Reporter. So when I was going through interviews, employers were pretty impressed by the fact that we were actually working with real-life clients. A lot of the skills that you come out of this class, and a lot of the other classes in the program, are very, very practical in the job market.
“I also remember, I had a question about Google Analytics for [Prof. Rich Gordon], and he responded, ‘It’s not on the top of my head, but we can look it up,’ ” she recalled. “Working for a startup nowadays, there are a lot of questions that you don’t necessarily have an answer to, that you can look up or ask someone more experienced or a friend or mentor. A lot of things have to be figured out by yourself. Embracing the uncertainty is very important for these types of jobs as well. So I would say that this course really helped me to learn that.”
Tell us about your San Francisco experience
“Before Medill, I was working for a traditional news outlet, with a lot of corporate bureaucracy, and a lot of decisions were pretty slow to move forward.”
In San Francisco, Wuqiu’s internship was at Alpha Group, the in-house product incubator for Advance Local, which operates newspapers and digital publications in nine U.S. markets.
“I think that being able to work with a small startup for that internship, really enabled me to understand how a startup works and basically what impact you can make in a small team,” she said. “And working in the Bay Area, and getting a feel of what it’s like to work there. Whether you like it or not, I think that’s a very important thing to get from the program.”
Kerrie Vila (MSJ/BSJ ‘20), senior project manager, News Revenue Hub
Kerrie studied journalism as a Medill undergraduate and was accepted into the accelerated master’s program, which allowed her to complete her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in four years. She participated in Northwestern’s undergraduate program in San Francisco, which is geared to students studying journalism and design.
“I entered Medill and felt I wanted to be a journalist,” she said. “The (undergraduate) San Francisco program introduced me to the way product has an influence on journalism and how design has an influence on journalism, and that was more of what I was passionate about.”
Since graduation, Kerrie has worked as a project manager for News Revenue Hub, a nonprofit that helps mission-driven news organizations develop audience and business strategies.
“My company works with 70 newsrooms all across the country,” she said. “It combines the two things I care about most: Making a sustainable future for journalism and also figuring out what news products look like in the future.”
Tell us about your current job — maybe a typical day
“I have about 13 clients I work with on a day-to-day basis, and then there are other clients that I hop into. So a lot of my days are in meetings, but it’s really interesting because no two meetings are the same.
“Depending on the time of year and depending on what the newsroom is working on, I could be in a revenue strategy meeting, setting [Key Performance Indicators] and trying to figure out what the next year is going to look like. And then other times, it’s, ‘What is this new newsletter product going to look like.’ Or trying to dig into Google Analytics to figure out what returning users are doing. And then between meetings, it’s helping get the work done.”
What experiences, courses and people did you encounter at Medill that influenced your career direction?
“I think all my favorite classes were the ones we took in San Francisco. And the internship I did at KQED, which is the NPR and PBS station there, doing audience development. I learned so much. It was my first time working at more of a legacy media company. So actually seeing what it was like to be in a newsroom was just such a helpful experience.
“And then the design thinking class, where we worked with the San Francisco Chronicle. Being able to bring that up in interviews and talk about working with, and consulting for, Hearst Media, what was widely regarded as a great newsroom, was really helpful and it made connections. I still talk to the folks at the San Francisco Chronicle, sometimes weekly.”
“And the Business of Innovation class, which introduced me to business in a way that we were never taught as undergrads at Medill, and to things that I do now all the time. Like how products fit in the market, and how to create a roadmap for products, how to set goals that are realistic. And doing real business planning, which I never done before, and now I use those skills every day.”
Jennifer Drysdale (MSJ ‘21), multiplatform editor, The Washington Post
Jen, who majored in communication at the University of Southern California, came to Medill after five years working as a writer and editor for the “Entertainment Tonight” TV program’s website.
“All the traditional journalism roles that you can think of, I did there,” she said. “But I was curious about other things, and how everything worked and came together. So I went to Medill and got exposure to all those other areas I didn’t even know existed.”
Tell us about your current job — maybe a typical day
“The Post obviously is a gigantic organization that produces a lot of content. My team, the curation and platforms team, are sort of the gatekeepers to certain platforms. So we’re responsible for distributing our content on the app, dealing with alerts, both with our app and with Apple News. So we also work very closely with the editors at Apple News and figure out how we can best package and present our content for the different platforms that we work on.
“We attend news meetings and identify and pinpoint what stories you think would do well for certain sections of our app, or might require additional attention. You use your news judgment to identify, among all the content that the Washington Post produces, what is best for our mobile audience.”
“There also are some longer term projects and experiments. So for that, you know, you’re taking stock of analytics reports and keeping an eye on what’s resonating with our audience and figuring out how we can make the best experience for them through the Post and its mobile products.”
What experiences, courses and people did you encounter at Medill that influenced your career direction?
“My favorite class was the Business of Innovation with Jeremy Gilbert and Coleen O’Lear (of The Washington Post). It was a great class, and it really exposed me for the first time to other things that I could do with what I thought was a strictly editorial background.
“That class was really, really important in me figuring out that I could use my background in new ways, and utilize strategy, and explain the thinking behind my decisions.”
“I also loved NUvention Web+Media, in which we were teamed up with students from different backgrounds and disciplines. My team made a houseplant app, connecting plant sellers and plant owners. That class taught me a lot about working with others and specifically, working with developers, and why certain features may take longer to roll out and how you need to communicate priorities, and ways to pivot and work around things that aren’t working.”
Tell us about your San Francisco experience
“In San Francisco, the UX design course that we took with Anthony Jakubiak, I think that was everyone’s favorite class. Our San Francisco experience was wonderful, but that class in particular gave me lessons and a framework — how a small detail can make a really big difference to the user in terms of how they’re consuming news. I use that a lot now in my current job.”
What do you wish you had known about Medill and the media innovation specialization?
“I wish I knew it was OK to reach out to people, sooner. This program was great, and it introduced me to a lot of different people who did a lot of different things. I didn’t know honestly what I wanted to do, and I took it very slow and steady, and followed up with people after I was introduced to them. But I wish I knew that you can literally just reach out to Medill grads on LinkedIn, and most of the time they’ll get back to you and be happy to chat. So I wish I knew that going in because I feel like I would have met a lot more people.”
About the MSJ media innovation specialization
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