Adrian Cox, MS, Class of 2016 - Vice President and Program Manager at JHT, Inc.

"I work for a tech company that develops educational and training solutions for customers in the government, academic, and healthcare sectors. The work I perform is quite wide-ranging but mostly involves analyzing requirements and designing solutions that solve problems in the areas of job performance, educational outcomes, and training effectiveness. My responsibilities fall broadly into three categories: designing solutions; managing projects (executing the solutions); and business development (to bring in new contracts).

Because of the nature of the projects i work on, I need to understand and apply principles of adult learning, andragogy, pedagogy, developmental psychology, and cognitive science. I collaborate regularly with professionals in the areas of industrial/organizational psychology, cognitive psychology, user experience design, user interface design, human/computer interaction, among many others. When it comes to the technologies I work with, we are basically talking about applying current and emerging technologies in the service of learning. This includes modeling and simulation, gaming, interactive media, virtual environments, artificial intelligence, intelligent tutoring, mobile app development, and distributed/cloud delivery of content. I can provide more detail on the technologies (e.g.. software applications, languages etc) if you need it. My M.S, in Psychology degree helped me to get my current position, and I apply it in my work in several ways:
First of all, simply having a Masters degree in any discipline bumps up earning capability, and in fact on graduation I was able to negotiate a 10-15% raise in my salary, since higher degrees are valued in the field in which I work.

Broadly speaking, psychology as a subject has direct relevance to the kind of work I do. It allows me to effectively communicate with other professionals and colleagues with educational background in psychology, and professional psychologists (despite the fact that I am not working in a clinical setting). Although further to the last point, I have had occasion to work with clinical psychologists - on a proposal for a TBI rehab tool that uses virtual reality.

Technically, the types of solutions I develop and manage require an understand of subjects, areas, concepts, and phenomena that are touched upon in the MS program at PAU. This includes elements of our current understanding of brain and behavior, cognition and affect, the history of ideas/systems in psychology, learning and memory, and aspects of childhood and adult development.
I have to be able to survey, understand, and apply the results of large numbers of academic and scientific studies. I wouldn't have the ability to effectively interpret and critique results without the knowledge and skills I learned in Research and Stats classes on the MS program.
The discipline of Modeling and Simulation has a lot of crossover with the effective design of experiments, and again I find myself applying a lot that I learned in Research and Stats classes."