Newswise — A chance meeting at an early morning professional conference session in Toronto, Canada, has turned into a dream job at Facebook for Wichita State University doctoral student Jessica Drum.
Drum, who graduated this month with her Ph.D. in community psychology, studies the way social media impacts our lives, especially when it comes to the positive and negative effects of social media on relationships.
She was presenting a poster on her dissertation results in Toronto this past July when she met a presenter who happened to be a researcher at Facebook.
“I walked up and introduced myself and talked to her about my research interests and how I’d always wanted to work at Facebook,” Drum says. “We exchanged information and she invited me to dinner with some other Facebook researchers and colleagues. We had a great evening, and by the end of the night she offered to refer me for an interview.”
Three interviews later, Drum was offered a job. She’s the first student from the Psychology Department to get a job with Facebook.
“The whole process was really surreal,” she says. “Working at Facebook was always a dream of mine, but I never knew how achievable it’d be. I would always say things like, ‘See, this is why Facebook should hire me' when I would get a wild research idea.”
Now that she has graduated, Drum will move to San Francisco and start at Facebook in January. She hopes to publish the work from her dissertation and jump right into her research for Facebook. She says she’ll know closer to her start date what else her job will entail.
Drum says Wichita State has played a huge role in getting her where she is today, specifically the Community Psychology Department and her advisor, Louis Medvene.
She says she always knew what her next steps and goals were in order to move forward, yet she was given the independence to develop her own ideas and skills along the way.
Medvene, who has worked with Drum for more than three years, says her success is an inspiration.
“It’s a very big deal for her and the Community Psychology Department,” he says. “She is someone who combines a very high level of intelligence and a very strong work ethic and is basically a very fine human being.”
She’s also an excellent leader on and off campus. Drum was one of the founders of WSU’s Community Psychology Association, now a recognized student organization.
And in 2015 she and four other Wichita State students took part in the prestigious Clinton Global Initiative University meeting with more than 1,000 students representing 300 schools and 75 countries.
Drum’s hard work led her to this position, but it took more than just that.
“Considering I got my ‘in’ at a conference, my advice for graduate students is to go to conferences and network. I know they are expensive, and I know there is little funding, but I truly think it’s worth it,” she says. “I would not have had this opportunity had I not been at the early morning session in Toronto.”
And for undergraduate students, she says the key is to keep moving, even when it seems daunting. She moved directly from undergrad degree into a Ph.D. program. And while she says it felt like it took forever, it’s all been worth it.
“I kept going, and now I'm a doctor and have never been more proud of myself,” she says. “I feel like I'm now fully prepared to start my next adventure.”# # # # #
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