As a Hamilton College student Sabrina Yurkofsky ’15 wanted to pursue a career in the television industry, and she majored in two subjects she thought would help her get there: communication and psychology. With help from the College Career Center, she did internships related to the field.
To top it off, Yurkofsky received a prestigious Hamilton fellowship that allowed her to spend her senior year doing a research project to evaluate sexism on television and its effects on viewers. The work combined both disciplines. (Note: communication is now offered only as a minor at Hamilton.)
Now Yurkofsky is pursuing a master's of business administration at New York University’s Stern School of Business as a recipient of the William R. Berkley Scholarship. She’s concentrating in entertainment, media and technology and intends to enter the television and film industries.
Both her Hamilton majors helped her understand the relationship between people and the media they consume, she says. Her communication studies focused on the messages themselves. “The study made me think more critically about the messages we receive, which led to my interest in media effects from the psychology perspective,” she says.
In psychology she explored the impact of media messages on the viewer. “I learned how to conduct a quantitative experiment examining this impact. As someone who wants to go into television production, I consider it an obligation to understand the potential positive and negative impacts of such media on viewers,” she says.
