Theo Lee, a UCSB alumnus, opens up about how his time spent as an Anthropology major and Resident Assistant contributes to his current success in media writing. Lee is now Senior Publicist at Zapwater Communications, an award-winning PR Agency in Los Angeles, and his personal essays have been published in the LA Times and Business Insider. 

The digital age may have gutted the bottom lines of many traditional publications and made it harder than ever to make a living as a writer, but UC Santa Barbara Anthropology alum Theo Lee, who graduated in 2022, has already found success in the field of media writing.

Within three years, he has become Senior Publicist at Zapwater Communications in Santa Monica, California, an award-winning PR agency working with lifestyle brands such as Marriott International and Copa Airlines. And his freelance work has been published in the Los Angeles Times and Business Insider.

In a recent interview, Lee got vulnerable about how his time as a UCSB Social Sciences Major and undergraduate Resident Assistant led to his success as a PR strategist and freelance magazine writer.

How did you decide on Anthropology as a major, and are there any skills you learned from that discipline that transfer to what you do in your career today?

I kind of fell into it, to be really honest. I came in as an Economics major, but I realized that as far as outcomes, I didn't want to do anything in finance. I found it super boring. So, I took a class in Anthropology my first year. It was an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, and I loved it.I found that I was good at it, like I had a knack for that cultural study of peoples and our origin, and the faculty were just amazing. That helped me become a better writer because in Anthropology you write all the time. It's all essays. I talked to friends who are in STEM, and they have never written an essay or they've never used their personal voice. I could not imagine that. So, I think it's helpful in that capacity. I think learning about the way that humans have adapted over time to the different societies is a great knowledge base for almost any communications or relationship-based job — because you understand a little more about how people tick, and it also gives you the context of where we are.

Did your time as a Resident Assistant in the dorms help with anything you’re doing career-wise now?

Being an RA was helpful in event planning; you put events on. It was helpful in just building interpersonal relationships while you're in a position of power. I mean to say that ostensibly, but we treated each other more as friends. [The residents] would come to me for advice on classes or relationships, or just logistics, getting around campus. I liked to be a resource for them. There are a lot of transferable skills when you do anything that deals directly with people.

You went from a recent graduate to a senior publicist at a big agency. Can you walk us through how that opportunity came to life?

Yeah, after graduating, I applied to a number of PR agencies. Eventually, I got in contact with one agency that's based in Chicago, but has a branch in LA called Zapwater, and I had a very brief video interview with them. They offered, as a favor to me, as a new graduate, for me to come in and shadow and see if I enjoyed the environment or might be interested in trying to intern there later. It was an unpaid shadowing, and I accepted it. They eventually decided to move forward with me as an intern, which is what I wanted. And they ended up keeping me on as a paid intern and back paying for when I had been shadowing for free. So that earned my loyalty, and obviously I earned theirs.

Aside from your full-time position at Zapwater Communications, you have also published personal essays in the LA Times and Business Insider as a freelance writer. How did that happen?

You know, I hadn't previously realized that freelance writing was such an ubiquitous, it's-everywhere, kind of thing. I didn't realize that people were doing that. My conception of magazines and newspapers and publications was that the people that wrote for them were on staff, you know, and were paid every two weeks by the publication. But freelancers are completely untethered and unrelated.

Once I got into PR, I realized that was something that you could do as a side gig, for lack of a better expression. And I was really interested in it. I had done so much work in PR, getting coverage for my clients, but I never had my own personal deliverable. I never had anything with my name on it, and I thought that was really frustrating when I was putting in all this work. I love PR, don't get me wrong. I actually really do. But this idea of having my own name on something — I thought would be more fulfilling.

I began to look for angles where I could break into this industry, and one way to do that was digital, like getting a digital essay, an easier story category to land. In 2024, my birthday fell on February 29, so I have a leap year birthday, and that's a pretty rare thing. I knew that Business Insider does stories about that, and I had a timely hook, so I pitched their Lifestyle editor a personal essay on my experience growing up with a leap year birthday, and she bit. She liked it without even seeing any prior work.

It was a great first byline, a good first name brand, but I'm much prouder of the writing in my Los Angeles Times story. For that one, I have Apple News on my phone, and I got an alert one day in summer of 2024 for an essay in the Los Angeles Times about finding love at work. I hadn't heard of that column before, so I clicked it. I saw that it was part of a column called LA Affairs, ways that people find romance or explore relationships in the city. I thought I had a great angle for that, having grown up in Long Beach, California, close to the city, but not really a part of it in most people's general concept of LA. I had a partner at that time who showed me so much of it, even though she was from a different state entirely. We explored LA together, and that was one way that we bonded. I really enjoyed that angle. It was new content, a different take than anything they had. Now I use both of those bylines when I'm talking to a new publication.

With AI on the rise and threatening to replace many writing jobs, what advice would you give current UCSB students dreaming of entering the industry as writers?

Think about how to differentiate yourself from AI…What can AI do well? And then you need to do the things that it does poorly. So, AI can draft a decent looking format for a press release, but AI cannot evoke emotion like your writing can. The way that you use your voice, your tone, can completely change the way someone feels emotionally, and I've never seen AI do that. Do what AI cannot, which is to say, get very good at storytelling. Write differently because — and this is maybe a harsh message —if your writing is quite factual and quite to the point, I hate to say it, but AI can do that. So learn a new way to write.

Linh Truong is a third-year UCSB student majoring in pre Psychological and Brain Sciences. She wrote this article for her Digital Journalism course.