Are you good with people? Interested in marketing?  Love social media?  Then you’ll love our Spotlight on Annie Dreshfield, a Scrippsie whose hybrid job includes PR, social media, and community management at Nextdoor.com, the ‘private social network for your neighborhood’!

SCRIPPS PROFESSIONALS NETWORK: So what was your life at Scripps like?

ANNIE: I went to Scripps partially because I fell in love with the campus the first time I ever saw it (while visiting my brother for his first Parent’s Weekend at CMC), but also because I knew I could receive the education I wanted. I knew I was going to study writing and even though that would require self-designing a major, I realized that I was excited by the chance to design my own major. When I sat down to talk to my advisor, Kimberly Drake, early my first year, she asked me about any other topics I’d be interested in studying, and I chose media studies. I’d obviously grown up with the internet, but I’d also grown up playing video games and participating in online fan fiction communities. I wanted to somehow work that into my education and possibly a job after college. I ended up self-designing a major called Creative Writing for Contemporary Media, which was basically a writing major fused with media studies, specifically new media and digital media theory.

Self-designing a major completely shaped my education and time at Scripps, and I couldn’t be more thankful that I was not only allowed, but encouraged to take part in determining my own education. I ended up writing my thesis on online fan fiction communities, which was surreal – if I’d told my younger self that I would be penning a 100+ page research paper on my hobby in college, I probably wouldn’t have believed it!

Continue reading Scrippsie Spotlight: Annie Dreshfield (2013) →