Larriyah Graham ’25 comes from a family of artists — photographers, graffiti artists, sketchers, and crocheters. Their great-great-grandmother was one of the famous quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, whose exquisite blankets have been exhibited in museums across the country, including the Smithsonian.
Graham is living beyond anything their ancestor could have imagined, designing art using pixels and code instead of needle and thread and securing a job offer at one of the world’s largest and most recognizable corporations by the time they graduated from college.
It’s a story unique to the Brooklyn-raised Graham, an interactive media major with minors in computer science and Asian studies who has who has been offered a software engineering position at Amazon.
The valedictorian of their high school class, Graham, the second of four children, knew their parents would not be able to afford their college education and that they needed to find alternative funding. They’d taken AP computer science and was learning coding through a program called Code Nation when they found an avenue to Clark as the recipient of the Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship.
“I was truly blessed, because I did not know how I was going to figure out college,” Graham recalls. “When I found out I would be able to go to school, I felt, ‘Well, this is beautiful. This is awesome.’”
Graham came to Clark in 2021, prepared to continue on a path of study heavily focused on computer science, and they acknowledge that the early courses were all-consuming.
During sophomore year, Graham spent a Study Abroad semester in Japan, where they had something of an epiphany. They took history and language classes, worked on Japanese-speaking skills, and became entranced with a game design course that introduced them not only to the technical underpinnings of the art form, but also the storytelling components that make a game come alive for the user. The cross-cultural conversations with the instructor, a Japanese man eager for insight into the American mindset, they say, were “eye-opening.”
“It gave me joy,” they remember. “I definitely got a wider perception of the world, and what I wanted to do in it.” By the time they returned to Clark, they’d already made up their mind to change majors to interactive media through the Becker School of Design & Technology.
“It’s like you’re building a product from end to end,” Graham says of game design. “From the art, to the music, to the menu screens … to everything.”
Game Studio, a weekly, semester-long course where teams of student artists, writers, and designers work to develop a game in concert with faculty mentors, has been revelatory, they say, because it not only nurtures necessary creative, technical, and operational skills, but it encourages independent thinking and offers leadership opportunities. Through their classes, and especially in Game Studio, Graham earned insight into the many ways that game design at Clark meshes the power of the liberal arts with the possibilities of technology to create compelling narratives.
“I think people get very specialized,” they say, noting that a philosophy class has been among the most valuable when considering design and storytelling opportunities. “But when they get too specialized, they don’t learn about the actual world we live in, and that creates tension.”
Graham’s own horizons were expanded considerably through the Amazon scholarship. Each summer for the past three years, they’ve interned at the company’s Seattle headquarters, where they worked to build services that make customer interactions more efficient and productive. Through shadowing and mentorship, Graham learned about specific jobs, was introduced to the company’s culture, and explored avenues for future advancement. One of the great pleasures of was living and collaborating with a core of peers from around the country, a group with whom they’ve grown close.
“I’ve been so grateful not just for the opportunity to go to college, but for the fact that the internship gave me a community of people I still talk to. People like me,” they say.
Since junior year, Graham has been president of the Clark Photo Society, which has allowed them to indulge their artistic passion while serving as a conduit to students who want to shoot and display their original photos. The club needed a reboot after “fizzling out” during the pandemic, Graham says, and they took up the reins to renew spirit among the existing members and promote the club to other campus photographers of all ability levels. In February, the Photo Society opened an exhibition of original student work, “Threads of Us,” which attracted a sizeable audience of faculty, staff, and fellow students to the Harold Stevens Gallery on Main Street.
“I think of photography as capturing the essence of something,” says Graham, whose photos in “Threads of Us” included intimate black-and-white portraits of family and friends. “I want to have that sensation of sharing my experiences.
“We’re getting more known on campus,” they add of the Photo Society, “and we’re slowly building up our numbers.”
Graham’s artistic muscles get plenty of exercise in game design classes. They’ve created a game called RunTime that features an endless 2D “runner” who encounters obstacles in their path. The player avoids the impediments by manipulating a Microsoft Adaptive Controller. Graham notes that adopting this specific controller into the game was a conscious choice because it’s easier to use for anyone with any sort of hand impairment.
Graham also helped create an original digital language from scratch — then worked with friends to debug it. (“I’d much rather debug code than build it,” they confess.)
“You can make a language at any time,” Graham attests. “The issue is getting people to use it.”
Among their current classes is Serious Game Project, taught by professors Terrasa Ulm and Ilir Mborja, in which video games are created for purposes beyond pure entertainment, such as academic instruction or professional training. Students have an opportunity to work directly with a client to meet a specific need. Graham and their classmates collaborated with the organizers of PAX East, the annual gathering of game developers from around New England, on creative ways to increase traffic to the many vendor and display booths set up throughout the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
“This is what I love about the game design department — we actually get to do things with external partners,” they say.
“When I’m at Clark, I love my liberal arts and using my right brain. And when I’m at Amazon, my left brain is ready to go.”
During the Amazon internship, Graham learned that they prefer to oversee the evolution of a product through each stage of the process, noting that the company’s development cycle is similar to that of Game Studio. And as a supremely organized person, they’re insistent on sharing best practices for getting projects accomplished.
“Half of the stuff I’ve learned at Amazon I actually use at Clark,” says Graham with a smile. “When I’m at Clark, I love my liberal arts and using my right brain. And when I’m at Amazon, my left brain is ready to go.”
Photographs, Steven King, Clark University photographer
