Equipped to Lead and Succeed
San Francisco Advantage
New Graduate Lands Job With San Francisco Giants
Ember Young ’26 talks about broadcasting, baseball, and how to find a position in a field you love.
What are you up to this summer?
I’m a production assistant with the San Francisco Giants. Before each game, I help make sure everything is ready to go, and then during the game I get to shadow different people — camera operators, replay, graphics, technical directors — to learn what they do. Every game is a live production with thousands of moving parts, and I get to be one of them.
How did you land your job with the Giants?
I applied through a LinkedIn posting. I had worked for USF Athletics as a video production assistant, and that experience gave me a lot to talk about during the interview because I understood broadcast cameras and audio and how a live show works.
Did your USF schooling prepare you for this work?
Yes! The advertising program helped me understand networking and having my LinkedIn and portfolio ready. You can say you’re a creative, but if you have nowhere to show your work, people don’t believe you. During my interview process with the Giants, they emailed me about 30 minutes after my interview and asked to see my portfolio. All I had to do was send them the link because I had everything ready.
What advice would you give a student interested in advertising or media?
Talk to Professor Marthinus JC van Loggerenberg or Professor David McGrane. They’ve been in the industry for a long time, they know how things work, and they know people who can help you get into the industry.
Now that you’ve graduated, what’s your best career advice to your first-year self?
It takes time to find your path. I changed my major like four times. I came in undeclared, and then I became a marketing major with a communications minor, and then I realized that I hate communications and I really hate economics, which you need for marketing. So I was kind of in limbo there for a while, but eventually I landed on an advertising major with three minors: design, psychology, and African American studies. I reached out to my advisers, met with my CASA coach, and spoke with Career Services and asked them to help me figure out what I wanted to do when I didn’t have the vocabulary to even think about it. When I first came to college, I didn’t know what an art director was, and now that’s what I want to be.
