Susan (Lowrey) Gill

Degree(s): BJ ’05

Whereabouts: Blacksburg, Virginia

What do you do?

I currently work as the director of project management in the marketing and communications office within Virginia Tech’s Advancement division.

How did you get your job?

I got this position by having supportive supervisors willing to develop my skills and help me find my place in the organization! One supervisor pushed me to get my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and paid for the training, and another helped carve out my current role when I needed to make a change from a previous position. I started my career as a newspaper journalist, moved into direct-mail marketing for a travel company, taught myself how to code, and landed a position managing social media and websites. All these jobs built off the skills I learned along the way, and all of them were tied with being organized and managing deadlines. It makes sense in hindsight but wasn’t obvious along the journey.

What is the best professional lesson you learned at the J-School?

Take every opportunity to learn and hold onto innate curiosity. Journalism was a good fit for me because I’m naturally curious and like to learn new things. I was taught how to harness that curiosity and combine it with strong ethics and morals. I learned how to be a critical thinker and look at how a small thing fits into a bigger picture. This is what I do on a daily basis, and I’ve been told that those soft skills bring needed insights into the strategic, high-level conversations I find myself in now.

What advice do you have for current students?

Say yes and be brave. I loved trying new things and embracing change as a positive thing, and with the ever-changing world of communications and marketing fields, especially in higher education, things are ALWAYS changing. You can learn to be agile and see opportunities with change, and it will serve you well in your career.

What is your favorite J-school memory?

I was learning newspaper design the night the Iraq War broke out. I was designing the regular paper’s sections, and another student was working on the special section insert. The system that connected the computers to the presses went out. We had no way to get the pages to the presses to meet deadline that night. One person in the newsroom, Ron, knew how to do paste-up. They had stopped teaching paste-up at this point, so none of us had any experience with it. Ron got out all the tools from a forgotten drawer (pica pole, glue/wax, rollers, etc.), and he went to work, explaining along the way what he was doing. After the broadsheets with pasted columns and cropped hardcopy photos were assembled, he walked them over to the presses. The special section went out with the rest of the paper the next morning because Ron ensured he made the deadline. I learned that night the value of having a Plan B and understanding the practical history behind what I was doing. I also learned that night how badly technology can fail, so you need to be agile and have a breadth of skills. I now do risk assessment and mitigation as part of my project management work, and I think about this experience every time I set up a project plan. Thanks for what you did, Ron!

Additional comments

The lessons I learned at the J-school gave me such a strong foundation that, even thought I haven’t been a working journalist in more than 15 years, I am still forever a journalist in my heart. I’d like to think I carry forward that integrity and work ethic into everything I do, and I support journalism and journalists where I can. The journalism community is a strong one, and the connections I’ve made because of Mizzou and the J-school make my professional life very rich. I’m grateful for the experience I had as a student, and I hope I represent the school well in my alumni life. M-I-Z!