Department of English

The following is a post authored by Amanda Lewis, a Penn English Major from the Class of 1999. Gwen is a Film Producer at Original Film.

I am a producer at Original Film, and I have a lot of longevity at my job. I actually started here as an assistant right after I graduated. That’s incredibly rare in entertainment, to be at one company over the course of a career. In my role, I oversee a movie from inception to release, so that can mean working with writers to ideate, reading and giving notes on scripts, finding directors and actors to be a part of the project, and perhaps most crucially, finding someone to finance that project. I also had a TV show come out this spring, the first time I’ve been involved in TV.

I loved coming to Penn and being in a new city. It wasn’t just a new city, but a new coast. I grew up in Los Angeles, so coming to the East Coast in general was a very new experience for me. And I loved the way that you could have a very traditional, rich social life on Penn’s campus, but you could also very easily go into Philadelphia and experience all that the city had to offer. I was really happy that I got to do both.

At Penn I was an English major because I always liked reading stories and I liked watching stories, though I don’t think I always knew that was going to be a career path for me. It was just something I enjoyed. And there were people who came back to Penn as alumni who had found success in the film and TV world, and I was always really thirsty to hear what they had to say. I thought it was really valuable as an undergrad to have a model of people coming back who were in an industry I was interested in, especially then, before social media and the ability to find people as easily as you might today.

When we graduated, there was not a clear path of how to find success in the entertainment industry—and in some ways, there still isn’t. That’s very different than a lot of professions that Penn undergrads go into, and having the confidence to follow your own passion is something I think some Penn undergraduates need to be reminded of, especially when they have friends doing something that seems to have a very clear path. It’s OK to do something that might not be as tried and true.

The friendships that you make at Penn are with incredibly smart, accomplished people; when you are in the workforce together, it offers you a great shorthand in trying to make business relationships and connectivity. Yet even with those connections, you don’t have to follow a certain path. You can pursue many different interests and come up with your own story.

See the above coverage as it originally appeared on the Penn Arts & Sciences at Work website: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/at-work/amanda-lewis-c99/

For more highlights on English majors at work, visit our Alumni Spotlights page: https://www.english.upenn.edu/alumni/interviews