Courtesy of Jason McRuer
Jason McRuer, 27, has a Stanford degree in product design and a résumé stacked with engineering experience, but these days, you're more likely to find him on an indie film set than in the lab.
The 2019 graduate was among the surge of college students increasingly flocking to STEM degrees. But soon after graduating, McRuer made an unlikely early-career pivot, ditching his dependable product design job to pursue his passion for film.
The 2019 graduate studied product design at Stanford's School of Engineering. But even in his early days at the elite university, McRuer said he was drawn to the magic of filmmaking. After a student trip to the Sundance Film Festival, he said he started toying with the idea of pursuing a career in film.
Despite the pull of the silver screen, McRuer graduated with an engineering degree and landed an internship in January 2020. He was tasked with working on a vaccine cooler device just months before COVID-19 arrived in the US and made the product all the more necessary, McRuer said. The internship quickly evolved into a full-time product design position.
"As far as jobs go, it was a pretty good one," McRuer said. "But I don't think I was able to really flex my creative side as much."
He initially thought he could get his filmmaking fix via a hobby that played second fiddle to his engineering work. But the demands of his full-time job quickly made clear such a setup would be difficult, he said.
Over the course of nearly two years as a mechanical designer at Global Health Labs, McRuer strategically saved as much of his paycheck as he could each month, he said. Then, in September 2021, he took the leap.
"I quit the job with nothing lined up, and I moved down to LA," he said. "I was definitely nervous but also excited."
McRuer said he spent his early days in the City of Angels trying to network with as many people in the industry as possible. It was slow-moving, but he eventually landed a producer's assistant gig that got him working on his first official set.
He continued networking and steadily working, ultimately making his way onto the set of a feature film, a low-budget "scrappy" picture that allowed him to take on a lot of responsibility and learn the industry front to back, McRuer said.
After a year of fine-tuning his skills, McRuer ditched the West Coast and headed to Brooklyn, which is home to a thriving indie film scene. These days he does a mix of freelance writing, directing, and producing.
Making such a drastic career pivot felt like a massive "reset," McRuer said. But he was lucky to have support from the people in his life.
"I wasn't too concerned about pressure or optics," he said. "I think I'm a very pragmatic person, and I didn't feel like it was an unfounded decision to make this big leap."
Still, he was undoubtedly nervous about his future stability and anxious about potentially closing himself off from a future in engineering, he said.
But McRuer said he was ultimately surprised by the overlaps he's seen working in both engineering and film — particularly when producing.
"Producing kind of feels like you're starting a new company every time you do a new production," he said. "It's very entrepreneurial."
He said he has been able to apply his project management skills to his producing work, which requires tasks like keeping a schedule, managing budgets, and keeping tabs on all aspects of a shoot.
"It can be very technical in some ways," McRuer said.
McRuer said he plans to keep working in film as long as he can make it work.
"I'm really enjoying it right now," he told BI. "That's the gold standard for me."
