Ashley Kuhre Bartosh

How did you pick your career? Did you know all along?

I had no idea I would end up where I am. It happened entirely by accident, in fact. My first job followed my English degree: I was an editorial assistant at a textbook publishing company. Within 3 months, the company went through a restructuring and my role was eliminated. They saw that I had experience with InDesign and Photoshop because I'd put it on my resume (I ran the newspaper in high school and literary magazine in college) and asked if I would like to stay on as a marketing assistant instead. I said yes. And here I am. It wasn't that smooth, of course, but taking chances and leaping on unusual opportunities got me everywhere. When I graduated high school, I was sure that I wanted to go into neuroscience and get an MD/PhD for medical research. After my first year of pre-med, I decided I wanted the chance to explore more so I switched out of the science track and into liberal arts with the intention of taking a post-bacc in a scientific field. That's a LOT easier to do than to get a science degree and get a post-bacc in liberal arts! With a less structured course load, I added Latin, Italian, and French to my schedule. Studying Latin and French fed into my interest in etymology and English language linguistics, and I took classes on middle and Old English topics. Old English was a fascinating blend of literature, history, sociology, and materials science, so I focused on that. Did I consider my job prospects? No! I figured I was going on to be a professor. What else do you do with a degree in Old English? Apparently you go into data analysis and performance marketing and work at one of the fastest growing video game companies in the world.

What is the one piece of career advice you wish someone gave you when you were younger?

Your career is a story, and it is being written and revised in real time. Whatever you think of what you would like to do, being flexible will get you far. You may end up going places you didn't dream of--maybe you were too scared to reach that high, maybe you hadn't considered it a real career, maybe you just thought you'd do engineering but ended up loving something else instead--and the strength of that serendipity rests entirely on the back of your decision to make things happen. What you want now, what you went to school for, what you have experience in -- all of these are important experiences that will feed your future growth, but they are not shackles. Learn. Change. Grow.

In layperson terms, what do you actually do at work?

I look into data we've collected that tells me, in broad strokes, who our audience is. (If I don't have my own data, we make an educated guess and get data from other sources.) Once I know that, I can build a new audience based on a series of assumptions -- ones built on surveys, other experience, outside reference -- and start thinking of ways to reach out to them. My job is to share how cool the game I'm working on is and help other people find it! I use what I've learned to buy placements all over the digital world, or sometimes in real life events and billboards and newspapers too, to put my message out there. I work with the people making the game to pick those messages, and watch the performance of those pieces so I can make adjustments to make my placements (and money) ever more effective. Then I tell my bosses how much money I've helped them make, tell the design teams which of their awesome work brought in the best people, and do it all again tomorrow.