Stacey Jaffe (BA Psychology, Miami, 2003) [Vice President of Digital Content and Channels for Teach for America]: I came to Miami wanting to be a psychology major. I always was a kid person my entire life growing up. I always wanted to help kids. I had taken a psychology class in high school and was mesmerized by it. I was mesmerized by the study of the mind and behaviors, and from my very first psychology class at Miami, Psychology 111, I was hooked.

I loved the study of psychology. I loved research, I loved statistics--immensely loved statistics and data. I began to develop an intense passion for digital media and social media and began to really think about what I might do next in my career.

I'm the Vice President of Digital Content and Channels for Teach for America. It's basically my dream job. On the one hand, I get to do a job that has a lot of meaning. I get to work everyday to fight educational inequity. And on the other hand, my real passion is digital technology. I geek out over this stuff, I stay up late reading it, and I cannot believe that this is my job.

What really excited me about Teach for America was their mission. The idea that I could go back to what really drove me in my psychology undergraduate degree to help kids, and to help kids with a mission to eliminate educational inequity, to work on what I believe is one of the civil rights issues of our time: that of education.

Digital technology is entirely built on data and statistics, and it often leads me thinking about my Miami experience. The most valuable thing about a liberal arts education is the variety of skills you leave with. I think the ability to do logic and reasoning, the ability to take a data and statistics class, the ability to apply both to a hypothetical situation or things that happen in real life, and our skills sets that could be applied anywhere.

There are a wealth of opportunities for psychology majors in many career fields. I think if you're interested in digital media, the basis of all digital media is data and statistics, and that's also the basis of many psychological studies. I think the ability to do research and form hypotheses is the basis of many consumer insights research, or the basis of, quite frankly, almost any research you could be involved in.

[March 2017]