Introduce Yourself
Hi everyone, I’m Matt Shadbolt. I’m thrilled to be working with you all in this class, and it’s great to see so many familiar faces I’ve worked with before. I live just outside of New York in Denville, New Jersey, and I work for NBC Universal out of 30 Rockefeller Center, where I’m the Head of Product for all of the digital experiences across NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, The Today Show, E! Entertainment and Telemundo, and where my teams support all the individual news websites, mobile apps, streaming apps and emerging platforms for all of NBC’s news channels. As you can imagine, life is busy working in the newsroom, but it’s incredibly fulfilling work, especially when you get to work on large-scale national events such as elections.
Outside of work and being an undergraduate student, I’m a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan, which makes me a perpetual optimist. I love sushi, the movies, video games, and most things which fall under the nerd umbrella. I’m also a husband and the dad of a teenage daughter, so life is often very full.
I’m hopeful this class will offer a helpful toolkit towards what happens after Penn. I’ve greatly enjoyed my time over the past four years, and have a strong appetite to continue my academic work, especially in the field of antiquity and classical studies. But reconciling the professional work which pays the bills and the academic work I get up early to do is often a challenge. I’m excited to explore how I might think about the relationship of these two areas of work in my life, and bring a clearer sense of balance to both of them, especially when it comes to thinking about graduate work.
I’ve done many wonderful things at Penn. Despite being a virtual student I’ve been heavily involved with a number of Penn clubs, and written extensively for the Penn Moviegoer, where I also ran their website for four years. I also designed and built the Penn Dems website, which was great fun. I’ve met some incredible people and been fortunate to work with them. I’ve thrown toast at Franklin Field, drank tea at The Kelly Writer’s House, been featured in 34th Street, publicly presented in Irvine and been awarded a creative writing prize. But the most rewarding academic experience was the Russian political science class I took in my sophomore year. It was intensely challenging, but constantly evolving as the syllabus wrapped around the news of the Ukrainian invasion. An incredible experience not only to learn the political history of the soviet union, but to be able to build that work into an immediate sense of what was happening every day.
I very much look forward to the collaborations ahead, and I’ll see you all in the threads.
