For many students, walking by the Union or the DMC is an everyday occurrence. However, Lisa Dobias, an associate professor of advertising and the founding director of Texas Media and Analytics, remembers a time when they looked a bit different.

Dobias graduated from UT and recalls a time when the DMC was a parking lot and the Union was a space for students to share information about professors. 

“Our student government used to have ‘slam tables’ they’d set up — long tables with white paper and markers for all departments, social work, engineering or PR — and then you’d be encouraged to swing by and write a note about a class you loved or an experience you didn’t love,” she said.  

As a student, she would walk by and leave notes, but then as a professor, she intentionally walked away from the area so as to not dissuade students from sharing their opinions. 

This is one of the many fond moments Dobias shared from her time at UT, but perhaps the most remarkable moment is her memory of pitching the idea of the Texas Media and Analytics program. 

She pitched the idea to Dr. Gary Wilcox as a 19-year-old student and years later received a call from him asking if she wanted to bring her idea to life. 

Her response? “Yes, please.” 

Texas Media and Analytics, often referred to as Texas Media, is a highly competitive and renowned program. It’s a sequence of classes offered to advertising and public relations students, focusing on media insights and building students' knowledge about media strategy and data analytics. 

Many students apply each semester for limited spots in the sequence. Dobias, however, recalls a time when that wasn’t the case. 

“It was a hurdle to start a program in a space that so many people misunderstood,” she said. “They thought the media was one thing when it was really becoming another. 

“Getting people to understand what media is and what it is not was the biggest challenge because we were put in a box for a very long time.”

“Everybody thought, yeah, you're the people who just negotiate for radio spots, and why do I need to have classes in that? Versus we are frontline, strategic decision makers now sitting at the table, influencing 90% of a brand's budget, right?

But Dobias said she didn’t let it discourage her.  “It was the biggest challenge, but quite honestly the reason it needed to happen, because we needed understanding and appreciation for the discipline, and I needed to create a community of people who were experts in it,” she said.

Texas Media now has thousands of alumni in different fields. Before our interview, Dobias introduced me to a Texas Media alum who now works at Google in New York and stopped by to speak to Dobias and her students. 

Dobias refers to students of the programs as “scientific artists.” She said she coined the phrase initially because she saw herself as one. 

“In a degree where everybody was artists, I had the science because I wanted to ask all these questions. Who? When? Why? Then I found out there were people asking. So how do we bring people together?” she said. 

Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the program has grown exponentially and has two new lecturers leading it. Tracy Arrington and Theresa Andrews are Texas Media alums and past students of Dobias’. 

Looking to current students and future students, Dobias shared a few words of advice: “Try as hard as you can to focus on your growth and not your grade because you’re here to change, you’re here to grow and you’re here to expand who you were before.” 

But the connection she feels to her time at UT doesn’t just end at her work in the classroom. Dobias shared how she recently discovered something fun: she lives near Bevo.

“A few days before game day the Spurs will show up and I’ll be running an errand and I’ll see the trailer coming and cars will pull off to the side of the road and people will stand out with their Hook’ ems but people will see him and recognize hey here he comes you know, move over.”