Kate Berry

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I am a Customer Success Specialist in the Systems Engineering group at Avid Technology in Woburn, MA. I’ve been at Avid for a little over a year and I really love it. The product I support is called Interplay Media Asset Management (MAM for short), which is essentially a big database used to store video archives. There’s a lot of customization involved at each site, which means they’re all set up very differently, and one of the ways they’re customized is via short pieces of code called workflows. They’re written in a proprietary coding language, but it’s really similar to some of the languages I learned at St. Mike’s and a lot of the time when I’m troubleshooting an error for a customer, I start with the following the code in the workflow.

Most of our customers are big TV stations, like NBC, CBS, Supersport (in South Africa), Caracol (in Columbia), and M6 (in Paris) to name a few. The coolest thing I’ve gotten to do so far was work tech support for NBC Sports during the Sochi Olympics – my name was even in the credits. I work on issues for customers all over the world, so I talk to people in France, Germany, South Africa, Ukraine and Columbia (to name a few) on a fairly regular basis, which is also pretty awesome. Plus I work with a great group of colleagues, which I’ve found is extremely important.

My education at St. Mike’s definitely provided a foundation to thrive in this industry. My double major enabled me to have a strong background in mathematics as well as computer science. Obviously, the CS background has helped when debugging code, but the logic I learned in my math classes has been key – you’d be surprised how many times errors are caused by improper use of parentheses. In addition, the Liberal Studies aspect of my education at St. Mike’s has been extremely valuable. In today’s world, there is a shortage of technical people with the ability to express themselves to non-technical people. Between Liberal Studies requirements and peer tutoring, I left St. Mike’s with all the necessary skills to work efficiently with both customers and engineers.