How I Started in STEM with Wicked Saints Studios CEO Jess Murrey
Jessica Murrey is an Emmy award winning storyteller who spent years traveling the globe with the world's largest conflict resolution organization before pivoting to the mobile gaming world as the CEO and Co-Founder of Wicked Saints Studios.
How I Started In STEM with Jessica Murrey
So I actually got started because I love stories and I love telling stories. And I ended up telling stories of campaigns to try to change the world. I started working for an international peace building organization, the largest in the world. And I then took my storytelling and training to start training young activists all over the world and what we call common ground activism. And we saw how many lives were transformed and we wanted to scale that. And the best way to scale it is through technology.
When did you know you loved STEM?
I knew I loved STEM when I started to see the actual change that was making and how many people we could reach. For so long I was working with young activists all over the world in Bruni, in Nigeria, in Columbia. And I had to talk one-on-one and really get the stories to get the idea across. And then one day I was talking to a group of high school students and I saw how many of them wanted to change the world, but how few of them believed that they could do it. And that's the moment that we started to fall in love with games and gameplay.
What passion still drives you in STEM?
The passion that still drives me today is really young people in this next generation. I imagine a world where we can pick up the broken pieces of this world and build a new world. And that's the power that I feel this generation has. There's so many young people, so many young girls out there that are powerful and don't know that they are. And so with the game design and with STEM and with technology, my hope and dream is that they'll see how incredible they are. They'll see their own power and their sense of identity and just start changing the world.
Best tip for pursuing a career in STEM
My best tip for you if you wanna get into something in STEM, is to start creating. No one can hold you back from creating whatever you want. You don't have to wait for a promotion, you don't have to wait to get hired. You can just start building. You can start drawing, creating writing, you can start creating now, and that's what you should be doing. Because someone like me that's looking to hire someone like you, I wanna see what you've done. I wanna see what you've created because I hire for talent and smarts and attitude. Oh, failure is so huge. I've failed. I'm where I am today because I've failed so many times. And every time you fail, there's something that you can learn from that. And that's what allows you to pivot and to grow. So never be afraid to take risks and to fail because it will happen, but it should.
Importance of representation and diversity in STEM
The game industry is only 2% Black. Even though a higher percentage of the Black population plays than the average population. Even for women in gaming now I think we're up to 50%. And in mobile games there's actually more female gamers than there are male gamers. And you know, female gamers play more, they pay more, they play longer. And so, what's hard is because most of the industry doesn't look anything like me. Most of the time this kind of unconscious bias creeps in where people just think that I can't do it. And there's a lot of reasons for that. It could be my age, how I look, my gender, also my background. It can make it very difficult. But I know that there's things that I've experienced in the world that other people haven't and that's valuable and it should be out in the world. Then I also just have this incredible team of very diverse people from all, all spectrums of life and I believe that together we're gonna create something so unique and so beautiful because we're coming at it from all these different angles.
So I think even the word inclusion is interesting because what happens is it often expects exclusion. And so when people are like, Hey, like let's, let's make sure we include them. It's like, NO, I'm not just a side dish - I'm the main meal. And so I think that there's like a reframing that when we have different perspectives, that is a gift. It's not a chore to like, oh I guess we need to include them. You know? Which feels like a chore. It's like, no, they're going to present a gift because with diversity comes looking at things from all different angles.
More to check out:
How I Started in STEM: Capital One SVP on how to get your seat at “the table”
How I Started In STEM: How Ms. Pac-Man launched a career for Debbie Ferguson
How I Started in STEM: Helping Shape the Next Generation of Minds Through STEM
