DOUBLE MAJOR: Emily Hund, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Annenberg School for Communication, always had an interest in journalism, but during her freshman year at Penn State she discovered a passion for sociology, too. “The fields are so complementary,” she says. “I think it’s important that if you’re going to work as a journalist, or really any media role, that you have an understanding of the broader social issues at play.” It was a no-brainer for her to pursue both majors. Later, she began working as a magazine writer and editor, but academia remained on her mind, as research and teaching intrigued her.

EYE OPENER: While working in media in New York and Philadelphia, it didn’t take long for Hund to confront the reality of what was happening to the industry. “I didn’t see a long-term way forward for myself,” she says. “But I was fascinated by the changes I was experiencing firsthand, particularly how major industrial issues affected what kinds of content got produced. I decided I wanted to go back to school to study these issues, which were sort of a combination of my sociological and media interests.”

WHY NOT?: The stars aligned for Hund when she discovered all that the Annenberg School has to offer. “I thought, why didn’t I think of this program earlier?” she says. Hund began graduate school in 2013 and earned her master’s last year. She’s in the midst of a year of coursework before she moves onto the dissertation phase for her Ph.D.

PUBLISHED: Early at Penn, Hund connected with Annenberg alumna Brooke Erin Duffy. They found that they shared similar interests, and decided to collaborate on a project about how fashion bloggers portray their work online. Two years of research later, the pair published their findings this fall in the journal Social Media + Society and in The Atlantic. In December, their work was also featured in “Stuff Mom Never Told You,” a podcast from the website HowStuffWorks.

PICTURE PERFECT: Hund says the goal of their research was to explore the disparities between the rhetoric and reality of professional blogging. “I think part of it is demystifying the narratives of things being effortless or easy,” she explains. “The bloggers that we interviewed unanimously worked incredibly hard, and there are a lot of questions there about why there is a need to make everything seem so perfect online.”

UP NEXT: Hund will keep interviewing bloggers and others who work at the intersection of social media and the fashion industry to continue trying to understand the current state of creative work. She says she’d also love to continue writing for both academic and mainstream publications.