Pamela Wolf knew she wanted to be in video games since she was 12 years old. Her drive to break into the game industry is what ultimately led her to DigiPen, where she zeroed in on her strengths and mastered her chosen discipline. With her BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation degree in hand, she had the skillset and the tools to make her childhood dream come true.
Fast forward to today, and you’ll find Wolf employed at Microsoft as a software engineer in a role notably not tied to video games, and she couldn’t be more content. For the last six years, her full-stack work has seen her working on UI/UX systems, servers, databases, and the infrastructure for a number of Microsoft products, including the core accounts systems for Windows platforms. She’s been the lead developer on the open source Babylon.js GUI Editor, and she’s built and shipped additions to a node material editor — work that isn’t quite the same as game development, but scratches the same user-centric itch.
“To me, interactive software is the same as a game,” says Wolf. “Maybe the objective isn’t to kill the boss, but now the objective is to make sure the user actually understands how to buy a thing, or convince the user to keep subscribing, or help the user when they’re having trouble finding their device. It’s the same design problems and the same programming challenges that you have in a video game. It’s just themed a little differently, and to me, that is satisfying.”
When Wolf was early in her career, one of her team’s projects encountered an error, one that affected thousands of users. As a new member of the team, she was assigned to look for a solution. Using her well-formed understanding of user behavior from her games-focused DigiPen education, she found a critical bug, was able to track its origin, and fix it in a way that restored access to affected users. “Fixing a bug where it impacts a lot of people is really rewarding,” says Wolf. “If there’s a game bug, you want people to be able to win or progress, and that type of quality assurance is present in general software too.”
Games have always been a part of Wolf’s life, something her parents were aware of when they discovered DigiPen in their search for top-ranked video game colleges. It wasn’t long before she enrolled in ProjectFUN (now DigiPen Academy), a series of youth programs aimed at getting teenagers involved in game development. “I did four years of ProjectFUN every summer throughout high school,” says Wolf. “I knew I wanted to do games, but I didn’t know what my discipline would be, so I kind of tried them all.” In her last two summers, she joined Pre-College Program courses where she studied game design in the first summer and programming in the second summer.
After graduating high school, Wolf had little doubt about what she wanted to do next. “I applied to other schools, but I was pretty dead set on coming to DigiPen!” says Wolf. Having touched on so many subjects in the summer programs, she wasn’t sure which degree to pursue. “I jokingly say I flipped a coin by writing two application essays, one for game design and one for computer science. The biggest factor in picking programming was the added career flexibility. That mattered to my parents, and now as a working adult, I can see why it was a priority.”
There was also an element of self-reliance that drove Wolf to make computer science her focus for the next four years. “I realized that as a game designer I was able to direct what I wanted to do, but if I really wanted to get something done, I had to do it myself,” says Wolf. DigiPen’s strong focus on team-based projects and collaboration challenged that lone Wolf approach.
The mentality shift pushed her to make the most of the annual game team projects she joined by learning crucial multidisciplinary communication skills. “Being comfortable speaking the language of the other disciplines was really important at DigiPen and continues to be helpful to this day,” says Wolf. “Being able to speak the UI language of Figma to my designers and explain the technical requirements to build what they want is important, and it makes me very valuable.”
Wolf says another big added value was taking advantage of DigiPen’s career-focused resources, which set her on the path to her position today. “A lot of students think you have to be a senior or junior to get an internship, but I got mine when I was a sophomore,” says Wolf. It started with an event hosted by DigiPen’s Career and Alumni Relations where Microsoft visited campus to offer students advice on putting together resumes. “I was tired and making excuses, but my mom told me to go, and Microsoft reviewed my resume. They had some feedback, and I left feeling disgruntled that I wasted my time. They called me a few days later and I soon started interviewing for a summer internship!”
That internship at Microsoft led to a second internship after Wolf’s junior year. After graduating from DigiPen in 2019, she was offered a full-time software engineering role. The job isn’t in games like she had expected all those years ago, but her interests and passions, particularly those she tapped into when taking electives during her degree program, continue to be relevant.
“Working here can help fund other things I like to do, and if I wanted to, I could go make games on the weekend,” says Wolf. “Right now, I’m starting a fine arts side career and becoming a professional artist at art shows. Having a stable job and experiencing the adulting side of things changed my relationship with my passions and interests for the better.”