Staring out into space with both hands tightly gripping his controller, Sam Jeffery gets ready to embark on his next journey across the universe. As a kid, the sound of stars dropping and breaking around him as he stood at the edge of the world while playing Mario Galaxy filled him with a magical feeling.
From a young age, Jeffery knew he wanted to create something that captured that feeling.
“Even when I was a little kid, I was able to recognize that this was a special medium,” Jeffery said. “And I’ve been trying to chase that down for pretty much every year since.”
One way he has been “chasing” the video game medium is through majoring in game design and music technology, a combined program of study offered at Northeastern. As a second year, Jeffery’s studies focus on the sound and audio elements of gaming through prototyping, design, music technology and game engine courses.
Northeastern offers 329 undergraduate majors, 200-plus undergraduate combined majors and more than 200 graduate-level programs. Among this catalog are all the tried-and-true degrees like mechanical engineering, political science and business administration. However, unlike most universities, the lineup also includes majors like extended realities, geospatial services and music technology, reflecting specialized fields that are becoming mainstream.
Extended realities, or XR, is a master’s degree program that equips students with the “interdisciplinary skills, theoretical foundations, technologies, and processes essential for success in XR,” according to the program’s website. Extended realities, as Assistant Professor Eileen McGivney explained, is an umbrella term for immersive technology including augmented, mixed and virtual reality, or VR.
McGivney teaches “Extended Realities History, Theory and Impact,” a course that explores how various disciplines, such as art history, philosophy and psychology, apply to XR. She said she is excited to see what her students pursue after graduation, as their interests range from game design to fashion and art to health and education.
“I think they’ll bring kind of both a specialized set of knowledge as well as a really nice interdisciplinary perspective on just how to think about emerging technology across these fields,” McGivney said.
McGivney first got into the virtual reality field while researching how these tools could benefit student learning. She explained that VR isn’t meant to replace in-person experiences like field trips but can bring those experiences into the classroom more frequently.
“I think one of the fundamental challenges with school is that we see it as so divorced from the real world … how do we kind of integrate more experiences into the education system is what I’m really passionate about,” McGivney said. “And [VR] is one tool to do it.”
Victor Zappi, an assistant professor of music technology, emphasized the value of developing interdisciplinary perspectives. Music technology, offered as a concentration of the music major, offers an “interdisciplinary application of creative audio technologies to a broad range of outcomes, including analog/digital systems, hardware and software design, musical instrument design, audio synthesis and signal processing,” among other things, according to the program’s website.
In an era of groundbreaking developments in technology and artificial intelligence, Zappi argues that a very specific major like game design and music actually broadens a student’s options rather than limiting them.
“The more technology evolves, the more need for these hybrid profiles that are … heavily interdisciplinary,” he said, emphasizing that niche majors distinguish students from students studying mainstream topics.
Jeffery believes the uniqueness of his combined major will set him apart from others in the job market. This is already evidenced by his current co-op position in video production and interactive media at Biogen, a job that incorporates his expressive and technical skills.
“I think it makes it clear to employers that I’m creative … but also able to execute, whether that is through development, whether that’s through hands on editing, whether that’s through sound or audio,” he said. “It puts me in a unique position where they know that I’m doing this very specific thing because I really enjoy it and also because I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
Shaylee Moreno, a third-year behavioral neuroscience major, said her expressive therapies minor makes her stand out as an applicant, giving her the opportunity to integrate her passion for art with her interest in the brain through studio art and psychology classes. The expressive therapies minor is an interdisciplinary program that encourages students to “consider the role of the arts as a tool to foster resiliency and to facilitate change on the individual, community, and societal level,” according to the program’s website.
“I think a lot of people may not be aware of what it means, or they may have questions about what it is, so I think right there, it’s like a grab point for when you’re talking in interviews,” she said.
Moreno’s fascination with the brain was sparked at a young age by the TV series “Brain Games,” a show that explored cognitive science through brainteasers, psychological tests and illusions. With her expressive therapies minor, she is most interested in pursuing play therapy, something she is exploring at her current co-op at The Lark Center for therapeutic play, where she works with children who have neurological and developmental disorders.
Kiera Layden, a graduate student in the College of Professional Studies studying geospatial services, said that companies across sectors are beginning to incorporate a geospatial services team or department into their organizations in order to expand their spatial data systems, which can aid in quick decision-making and emergency response. Geospatial services, the topic studied under Northeastern’s geographic information systems, or GIS, degree, refers to work that captures and senses the reality of the earth, both physically and geographically.
Layden currently works at Clark Patterson Lee, an architecture, engineering and construction company as a GIS analyst. Most of her projects focus on infrastructure mapping, and the company is currently trying to expand more GIS-driven projects. One project she’ll work on in the future, pending proposal approval, will inform cities where they should plant trees by using urban heat assessments and tree canopy analysis.
“The city would like to find out not only where trees should be planted, but they also want to make sure that it is done equitably and equally distributed among all communities throughout their city, which is huge,” Layden said.
These types of mapping projects — especially those centered around conservation and environmental protection — that inform real changes and go beyond the confines of an office building are what she said excite her the most about pursuing the GIS industry.
For XR first-year master’s student Yaxin Mu, it’s the health and wellness industry that interests her the most. Mu said she hopes to create a project or game that incorporates music, audio and visual components to form an immersive meditation experience.
“They already have a lot of research that VR can impact your mind and your thinking, so I feel like VR is a good tool,” she said.
For Mu, XR was not always something she knew she wanted to pursue. She started off in illustration with traditional art mediums like oil paint and watercolor as an undergraduate student before switching to game design. After discovering digital artist Guangjian Huang’s work, she pivoted, eventually opting to incorporate digital art into gaming and eventually XR.
Because of the unique nature of these programs, most have only a handful of students. Students across different programs said that this small size grants them with more professor and adviser support as well as a strong sense of community.
“You get a lot of personalized attention. I think the faculty in this program are really passionate about making sure the program succeeds, making sure our students succeed,” McGivney said. “I think the other thing that’s great about it being a small program is you’ll find a community of people who really care about the same thing you do.”
