JMC Alumni Spotlight: Shaun J. Fletcher

• What was your major and how did you select it? Did anything influence your decision?

  • My major here at SJSU was Public Relations with a focus in Marketing. Originally, I had selected Marketing as a major, but as I started to learn about Public Relations, it provided an opportunity to hone some of the communication skills that I knew would prove to be valuable. I was always drawn to communication as an art form, but I didn’t know what I could do with it. As I learned about both disciplines, I began to see how human relations and human connections were more prevalent in public relations than marketing. As a result, I took the Introduction to Public Relations and I fell in love with it.

• Did you enjoy your time, while in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications? How was it interacting with peers and professors, while enrolled at San José State University?

  • It was fantastic! I was a student-athlete on the football team when I was at SJSU, so I had a different schedule than most undergraduate students. When I was on-campus, I tended to connect with certain professors that saw my potential – one of those professors was Bob Rucker. Over the years, he and I stayed in touch and he was very influential in my decision to leave Apple to come to SJSU as a Professor. When I was a student-athlete here, Professor Rucker noticed that I was somewhat underachieving and that I had greater potential than I was displaying. Professor Rucker, along with the support of the JMC faculty ensured a positive experience at SJSU both personally and academically.

• What was your first job after graduating from San José State University? What career did you pursue and why?

  • When I graduated from SJSU, I attended graduate school at the University of Central Florida. While I was there, another professor, who was very similar to Professor Bob Rucker, connected with me and helped my development tremendously. That professor saw that I was really doing well. I was top of the class down there and he recommended me for my first full-time job at Florida Hospital Center for Health Futures – it’s the largest hospital chain in the country. They had a department focused on investigating health disparities. Part of my role was to travel up and down the Florida Panhandle and Central Florida area to visit community health clinics that served low-income and marginalized populations. We dealt with cultural competency, so there was a lot of cross-cultural communication work. Although my first job wasn’t in public relations, it gave me an opportunity to really see the different aspects of communication from a cultural standpoint and that ended up being the impetus for pursuing my doctoral degree in intercultural communication at Howard University (HBCU).

• What is your advice for graduating students from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San José State University?

  • Have a plan of what you want to do and accomplish after graduation while being flexible to opportunities that may come and change your plans. Having a plan really allowed me to make fewer mistakes then I would have inevitably made anyway. It allowed for me to default back to a pathway that I wanted for my career. And then, when opportunities came about like being offered a position at Volkswagen Group of America or a consultancy that connected me with Audi – none of those were on my list, but my plan put me in position to take advantage of those opportunities. My greatest advice would be to have a plan for what it is that you want to accomplish and then start to work towards it in a tactical and strategic manner.

• What is your advice for prospective students interested in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San José State University?

  • Again, have a plan and know where this degree is going to fit within your broader career goals. You need to be more focused on what it is that you want to do as a vocation or as a career and then understand how you want this degree to further that goal. Whether that degree is going to help you further a career you’re already in or allow for you to enter a career path and make you more attractive in the job marketplace. Have an understanding where the degree is going to fit so that you can make it work for you. JMC’s program is moving in a more modular flexible direction with degree paths, but that can only be maximized if students have at least a general understanding of what they want that degree to do for them. Again, it goes back to planning and it goes back to taking control of your educational experience overall.