By: Spencer Derrenberger

Photo Credit: William Greenwood

Meet Ashton Greenwood, an MCS alum from the class of 2016. During her time at UMBC, she worked on UMBC’s Bartleby Creative Arts Journal and WMBC Radio. Since 2018, Ashton has been working at Diamond Comic Distributors.

In our conversation, she detailed her position at Diamond Comic Distributors, marketing in general, and her UMBC MCS experience.

Q: Could you describe your position at Diamond Comic Distributors? What are your roles and responsibilities?

I’m the Associate Marketing Manager at Diamond Comic Distributors and since we run a pretty lean marketing department, it means I wear a lot of hats. The biggest part of my job is organizing and executing the logistics and promotion of our annual outreach event, Free Comic Book Day. Free Comic Book Day is designed to engage existing comic book readers and expand readership to new fans by offering a selection of comic books, usually around 40-50, that consumers can get from their local comic shops. It takes place around the world at thousands of participating comic book shops, with an average of over 3 million comic books given away, again, for free. It’s a super fun event that generates a lot of buzz each year! My role is to build and promote the event from start to finish. First, by working with our publishing partners – companies like Marvel, Image Comics, Archie Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and more – to create that year’s list of available comic books. Each year, there’s a new set of comic books given out. Then, it’s onto promo merch (or “swag” as we like to call it): shirts, hats, lanyards, buttons, etc. After that, it’s time for my favorite part – marketing the comic books! That means interviewing the comic book creators, sharing sneak peeks inside the pages of some of the books, and keeping an active social presence. I’ll keep up with that promo until event day. On the actual day of the event, I’ll usually try to head out to a few comic book shops to get some photos and videos of the event happening in real time. Speaking of, Free Comic Book Day is coming up soon – Saturday, May 6! If you haven’t participated before, I highly recommend getting in on it!

Beyond that, I handle advertising partnerships, working with our publishing partners to build marketing

campaigns that most effectively reach the audience they’re after – comic shop owners, comic book readers, or both. I handle social media a selection of Diamond’s brands, including Free Comic Book Day, Comic Shop Locator, and Diamond Comic Distributors, among others. I also write press releases, field press inquiries, and manage our relationship with the “Comics Media” (in other words, journalists who write nearly exclusively about comics, pop culture, and all things nerdom).

Q: What qualifications or traits do you think are most important for this position?

The ability to prioritize and re-prioritize, for sure! Priorities shift pretty regularly so you need to be able to pivot and jump on something new. I want to be clear in saying this: not multitasking. I actually find that in a situation where you’re trying to juggle a lot of balls, multitasking creates more problems than it solves. In terms of qualifications, strong writing skills feel like a must.

Q: In your opinion, do you have any traits that specifically make you distinguishable from your peers?

My position relies fairly heavily on soft skills, like collaborating with publishers and building a rapport, so I’d say my generally bubbly personality has been helpful in that regard.

Q: What do you find the most exciting about marketing? Why does it interest you?

This is a great question! The thing I like most about marketing is engaging your audience and getting them excited about what you have going on. To that end, I probably like content marketing and social media marketing the most because there’s so much room to play! On the Free Comic Book Day website and socials, I always aim to keep it light and fun – we’re talking about comic books after all! We do a lot of polls and match-up brackets and make quotes and references. It’s really rewarding to see the audience get invested in certain books or characters and know I had a hand in building that hype.

Q: How do you think your experience with MCS at UMBC has prepared you for shaping your career?

I found all the different formats and opportunities for writing in the MCS program incredibly helpful! I got hired at Diamond right out of graduating from UMBC and had never actually written a press release before, but was able to pull from my experiences in MCS and make it happen. I also found the interview skills I learned as part of the internship requirement made a huge difference in my mindset and preparation during the interview process for this position.

Q: From your experience, what was the biggest or most important lesson you learned during your time as a student?

Might sound a little weird, but breaking down a big project into smaller, bite-sized chunks. There were so many times at UMBC that I would have a big project or paper and would get overwhelmed by how much would need to happen in order to finish it. Being able to break a big project down into small steps, and therefore small victories, is an approach that definitely translates to the professional world and makes a big difference.

Q: What advice would you give to a student considering a future in marketing?

First, to give some thought to what “side” of marketing you’re most interested in. Maybe it’s analytics, maybe it’s content and social, maybe it’s SEO. Marketing is an umbrella term, to some extent, and there’s a lot of ways to take it. Next, don’t take it so seriously. Marketing doesn’t have to be all “boardroom vibes.” It can be fun! I’ve had some of my best ideas and biggest successes when I let up on being stern and serious and let my creativity lead.

By: Rae Daniel

Photo Credit: Joey Scalise 

Alumni and good friend of mine, Joey Scalise started his UMBC career in 2017. He graduated in 2021 and has since taken various topics he learned in MCS and applied them to his jobs and career path. 

I sat down and talked to him about his journey through the MCS career and college, and what he has been doing since graduating.

The interview has been edited for clarity.

Rae: So, we’ve known each other since literally the beginning of our college careers starting in 2017, even just a bit before that. So correct me if I’m wrong, but when we first started, you were undecided in terms  of your major?

Joey: Yes, I had no idea. Well, I had a couple of ideas, and MCS was one of the majors I was thinking about, but I wasn’t completely sure at the time. I was thinking about theater, for a little bit. Just because one of my teachers in high school was really pushing me to do that. But, I took an MCS class and theater class both my freshman year, and I just ended up leaning more towards MCS because I felt like it was more promising and I just enjoyed it more. 

R: That was actually my next question, was “what made you want to choose MCS as your major?” 

J: I think it is just more usable in day to day life, I mean, I still use a lot of stuff I learned, especially right now with a lot of issues surrounding media in the last few years, it’s been great to learn and apply as everything’s been happening. I’m thankful every day for learning media literacy, and it was actually the first class I took, was [MCS] 101, and it’s helped me a lot. 

R: I’m glad it has. And you know, being in MCS comes with doing a lot of projects, do you remember any projects that were your favorites, or projects that stood out to you?

J: I think the one I’m proudest of is my capstone, just because it’s becoming more and more relevant. 

R: Really? What was your capstone?

J: It was about Google and Facebook data mining, I was also talking about the thing with Cambridge Analyica and the 2016 election. It and similar topics have been talked about more and more since then. Especially right now specifically with the talk of TikTok being banned soon, and that, I think, was the moment I really realized that it’s like “oh, my degree helps me because I’ve never had anything [that I learned] in school that was this applicable to real life, other than fun facts from food chemistry classes. It took through quarantine to finish.

J: I feel like MCS is kind of like technological philosophy.

R: What do you mean by that?

J: I think we've got a lot of modern philosophy  in all the classes, so that was helpful. I think a lot of the work  was reading and then writing about what we read, which really helped, like Foucault. I think just critiquing and thinking about modern culture around media technology, like looking at Black Mirror, and we watched Black Mirror episodes about three different times. It was a lot of thinking, looking at, analyzing, and just discussing a lot of concepts with modern philosophy. We’re surrounded by the internet and computers and it’s interesting seeing just how humanity interacts with it now. I genuinely feel like everyone should take a media literacy class. 

R: So what do you do now after your college career?

J: So right after graduation, for like, six months, I was working at Six Flags America in Bowie. I was the digital and social media coordinator. But it was a lot of physical labor. It was like 60% other duties asigned, I wasn't doing a lot of what I signed up for, the MCS stuff. Granted, on the one hand, like I was designing signs and using Adobe software, but then I had to go and put them up for like hours at a time in the dead heat. 2021. And since then, I've been working with Anne Arundel County Public libraries as a technology and  video coordinator at the headquarters in Annapolis.

J: So predominantly, I'm part of the virtual services team. We run the website, we provide hotspots and Chromebooks to patrons in the libraries, but we don't fix them and address those issues. Basically anything digital that isn't hardware related, is a living through like a web service-ish kind of state. That's what we do. And then my specific niche is video; video editing and helping with social media.I also now take photos at different events, especially in the summer because there's a lot of summer programs at the branches. I use Adobe every single day. I would know how to use it if I didn’t start with MCS. 

R: you’re ahead of me, that was also leading into my next question. Have you learned any new skills being in the position you’re in now?

J: I started learning [Adobe] After Effects. So that's been fun. I use it to animate the library system logo, that's a big thing. But also I've started learning about a little bit of HTML coding.  We had to make portfolios at one point for one of my MCS classes and then see. I didn’t think my portfolio looked too good, but it was a good start considering it was the very first time I'd ever made a website. 

R: What have you learned through searching for jobs fresh out of college, and the job hiring process as a whole? And do you have any advice for students searching for jobs?

J: First of all, there are scam jobs out there that I've almost fallen for. I've done the application process and then realized that it was fake like two or three times. So be careful. I was applying to like a couple hundred a week, I think, like right after graduation. Leading up to and right after graduation, throughout those four months that was a lot of jobs that I was applying to and I was using quick application functions through Indeed. And LinkedIn. I highly recommend doing those. Another one is, definitely make sure you have a portfolio, or a demo reel of your work. 

R: So do you see yourself staying in this line of work at the library in the future?

J: Maybe not specifically in the library, but just in what I do for the library. video editing, Visual and digital production. Ideally for a non-profit. I’m going to be looking for other jobs fairly soon, actually. The hardest part of this job, is that it’s really hard to make captions for posts, actually. It’s like, trying to reach and hype up an audience without having to use seven exclamation points to get your point across, but also saying just enough that it fits in like, a hundred characters. 

R: That’s understandable. So, last question then. If you were to give freshman year Joey some advice given where you are now, what would you tell yourself?

J: Don't worry. A lot of my last years in college were taken in the heat of the pandemic, and it actually helped me get better grades because I like doing work on my own time and being in my room helped me focus more, personally. But there was a lot of “what ifs” during that period, i just had to take one day at a time, and make the best of it. Also, don’t slack off too much, and you’ll be fine. The professors are very understanding. They helped me through personal and school issues when they came up. I highly recommend people try at least one MCS class, or think of it as a major if you have trouble deciding because it is such a broad topic. It gives you a lot of life skills too.

By: Ajel Balan

Photo Credit: James Parris

Meet James Parris - a senior of UMBC graduating this semester, completing his Media and Communication Studies major along with his Entrepreneurship minor. With an active mind and interest for business and marketing, Parris has started his own business in the form of a podcast, “The Jimbo Parris Show” - where he sits down with guests and have long-form conversations about their lives, the goal being to have these conversations teach and empower anyone about these topics such as marketing, business, and event things like art and spirituality. 

Prior to creating this podcast, Parris used to own a reggae radio station, where he would put his focus on making episodes around music, with interviewing people occasionally. Over time, he realized his passion with interviewing and its cost effectiveness of cutting the business down into purely interviewing. 

He attributes some of his success to his wonderful experience with his internship with General Electric. They would craft plans to attract a younger and authentic audience to the company. They want to work with influencers like Parris to draw people in. After the interviews, he would create snippets, ads, and reels that would display the scientist not as “a bunch of white men in stuffy suits talking about numbers”, but as a diverse group of individuals with passion for their work.

When it comes to courses in UMBC, he finds MCS 355 - Social Media: Networking and Mobility, MCS 334 - Media, Communication and Globalization, and MCS 499 - Capstone Seminar to be the most influential when trying to decide his path. It was through MCS 355, however, that he would find his direction. Taught by Dr. Donald Snyder, Parris goes into detail on how this class changed his perspective on the use of social media in marketing. He notes, “it showed me that social media was both an art and a science. I needed to see social media, not just in a purely logical standpoint of SEO promotions, et cetera, but there's people involved, there's emotions involved. When I began to understand that emotional aspect, I started to move my business in a direction focused more on inbound marketing, like content creation. It was no longer this fake, inorganic way of hunting people down. So it changed the general strategies I used.” He adds that even now, he keeps the textbooks used for the marketing class.

You would think that managing a business alongside doing university would put a strain on him, but Parris disagrees - as he notes the importance of passion when it comes to school and his business. Parris explains, “When you do something that's along what your purpose is, what you need to do, you're going to be able to perform well. And I think, maybe this is just me, but I think more people really need to focus in on the things that they're passionate about. This way, it's no longer a strain. Every Friday when I go down, sit down in my chair to do a show, or every Wednesday, I have a meeting with my team, it doesn't feel like work”.

If you’re interested, check out The Jimbo Paris Show at https://jimboparis.com/ and follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also watch it now on RokuTV.