4 Alumni with Majors That Led Them in Unexpected and Successful Directions

Danyel Semple (C’15), an attorney at a record label who works with Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar, found her sociology degree helped her contextualize and understand the business landscape and her artists’ backgrounds.

Sociology and Record Labels

As an attorney at an LA record label, Danyel Semple (C’15) works with a roster of major artists, like Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Finneas and Vincent Mason. She recently handled the production agreement for Lamar’s “Not Like Us” music video.

“Anything that happens with my artist, I am the attorney who handles it,” said Semple, vice president of business and legal affairs at Interscope Records.

Semple has planned to be a lawyer since she was 10 years old. A degree in sociology was not in her life plan, though.

The New York native arrived on the Hilltop in 2011 and set out to study history. She stumbled on a Russian literature class in the Department of Slavic Languages that read like “a Law & Order SVU season description” and loved it. She looked into more sociology offerings.

“There was a Latino sociology class, political sociology classes studying political systems from all over the world, and I found that I could find my niche and pick the things that I was interested in as a person, as my identity, while really never leaving the Sociology Department,” she said.

Semple switched her major to sociology and added a minor in film and media studies, a longtime interest and passion. Her senior year, she applied to the GEMA externship, where she met with alumni in the entertainment and media fields in Los Angeles, and realized the West Coast was her next step.

After graduating, Semple fulfilled her dreams of law school and becoming an entertainment attorney. Her sociology degree, she says, has helped her better contextualize and understand the world, the business landscape, her artists’ backgrounds and even the city she lives and works in.

“The sociology department, the film and media studies department, GEMA, the Georgetown Scholarship Program, the 1789 scholarship – all of those organizations helped me become the person that I am and move through the world in the way that I’m able to be myself and have this education,” she said. “Georgetown has given me so much. I really am so grateful to be in the network of such great Hoyas.”