In this 1-hour panel, alumni discuss their experiences in the program, how they identified their career path, landed current positions, tips and advice for those currently in or contemplating the program.

Panelists

Connor Thompson graduated in 2019 with the undergraduate DH minor. He currently works as a product strategy analyst at Salesforce in San Francisco. He uses DH principles/skills everyday at his job (tableau, excel, most importantly knowing how to tell a story using research and data).

Ronke Akoh, a 2021 graduate, is a singer/songwriter who created her own major, “Music Industry & Media Navigation,” using elements from Music Business, Music, and Digital Humanities. She is a Southern California native and grew up in the city of Hesperia. She currently works at an LA-based social media startup company called Pearpop in Creator Acquisition & Operations. In her free time, she is pursuing a career in the music industry as a professional singer-songwriter, creating more space for her songwriting, guitar-playing and music production skills to develop. Outside of her passion for music, she loves spending time learning about different languages, cultures, and means of human connection.

Jack Schaefer graduated in 2021 with a degree in Cognitive Science and a Digital Humanities minor. Upon graduation, he continued working in Prof Jungseock Joo’s Lab, where he did data analysis and machine learning work within social science contexts. He also began working at Prof Todd Presner’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies Digital Research lab, where he primarily worked on data visualization tasks and NLP processing. He is now working for IBM designing curricula for their software.