Student Spotlight: Student turns passion for video games into future career

Stevie West, a third-year film and animation student, has had a love for video games for as long as she could remember. This ever-growing connection to these games has inspired her to explore a future in the esports industry.

West, who is from Cazenovia, N.Y., has always had her eye on RIT. As a legacy student—where both her mother and father were RIT alumni—she fell in love with the facilities and the opportunities she could grasp at the university.

West found her group within the RIT Esports community. Taking more of a different route, West became involved on the production side of the competitive activity in her second semester. She quickly rose in ranks as she now holds the position of production director.

With her experience at RIT Esports, West was able to land a co-op this past summer, at PlayStation in California. As an esports intern, she got to help out with organizing tournaments and content creation, as well as better understanding the professional side of esports.

For those who don’t know about esports, how is it run in college?

Esports is the competitive side of video gaming. You can kind of think of it like any other collegiate sport. We travel to different competitions, we have semi-finals, finals, things like that. That’s how I explain it to my grandparents, look at college football and just replace football with video games—it’s pretty much the same thing.

Do you have multiple teams at RIT Esports?

Yes. We have more than 15 teams for pretty much any game that has a collegiate esports team. Our best team is our DOTA 2 team; they won the championship for the last two years. Our PUBG team just won as well. Our teams are pretty much at the top of the pack for a lot of different leagues and the skill level does vary. I know we have different divisions, depending on the game, so we can get a wider range of players competing, so it’s very inclusive. We do host tryouts where there is a cutoff rank that you have to reach. This is a little disappointing, but we always tell those people who get cutoff to stay involved on our Discord or join our support teams.

Since you’re on the production side of esports, what is that?

The production side of esports is the people who are behind the scenes doing all the stuff that you don’t really think about. I am in charge of our branding, how RIT Esports looks to someone not inside the club. I have the task of overseeing all of our graphics that go on social media and across campus as well. I also work with companies, including Meta Threads, to create our jerseys. With Champion, we create other merchandise to sell to our players, fans and family.

What does esports have in store this semester as we come back from break?

We are planning some sort of multi-school event. RIT Esports is also working more on community engagement—we want more students at RIT to think of esports as a staple organization on campus like any other sports team that we have. We want them to support us, buy our merchandise and come to our events.

What’s the most important thing about esports to you?

I think the community in esports is one of my favorite parts of it. Everybody is very welcoming no matter what your skill level is. Especially on the production side, we all have this common goal to create really awesome content for this thing that we all enjoy.

What are your plans for after graduation?

I would really like to stay in esports as a videographer. Over the summer I learned a lot about tournaments and organizing them, which would be really interesting. I would even potentially want to go into video game writing since I’m doing a screenwriting capstone.