Justine Bateman moves from acting to academia

It was her supervising producer who finally sat Justine Bateman down in her dressing room, put a hand on her shoulder and broke the news about college.

“Honey, you can’t go,” Bateman remembers the producer saying. “You’re under contract with Paramount Studios.”

She was 17 when she first applied to college. At the time she was one of the stars of the popular television sitcom “Family Ties”, but thought she could leave for college on the East Coast while still acting in a few episodes during the year.

Talking with her supervising producer made her realize the television business didn’t work that way.

Now a veteran in the entertainment industry, the 47-year-old, second-year UCLA student is pursuing a mix of computer science, business management and economics.

After working for three decades in the entertainment industry, Bateman decided to shift her career path a few years ago when she had the ability to go to school.

“I couldn’t have thought about (going to college) before that because I would’ve had to cancel everything I had going and jump out,” she said.

Before attending UCLA, Bateman wrote scripts and ran two production companies, in addition to her television and movie roles.

Bateman said she was motivated to go back to school after continually pushing for people in the entertainment industry to change the way they use technology.

She said she is the type of person who looks to the future of technology, while many people in the entertainment business are just concerned with current technology.

Her goal is to use technology to advance entertainment media, she said. And she hopes to start her own company to do it.

Getting burned out on acting auditions was another factor in her decision to pursue digital media management.

With a curiosity for technology, Bateman started auditing classes at UCLA for about a year before she applied in 2011. This quarter was the first time Bateman will walk into her classes with her own independent major – digital media management and computer science.

In one of the computer science classes Bateman audited before applying to UCLA, she met Paige Fox, who is now a fourth-year computer science and linguistics student.

Fox and Bateman became friends when they started running into each other during class office hours, which they both attended religiously.

They worked on homework together, trying to help each other understand the material.

“She’s a very committed and hardworking person,” Fox said. “She’s always excited to help me.”

Bateman capitalizes on collaborating with classmates and meeting with her professors because she appreciates how people are willing to teach her everything they know if she asks. She said it was one of the first contrasts she noticed between school and the work field.

“In the workforce, nobody gives you all this information, because if they do, you’ll get their job,” Bateman said.

David Smallberg, vice chair for undergraduate programs in the computer science department, is one of the professors Bateman reached out to for mentorship.

Smallberg said he thinks Bateman is more focused on her work than many UCLA students, since she knows what she wants to do with it.

Though Bateman has worked in the entertainment industry for decades, she says her fame had already gone by the time she came to UCLA.

“I was very famous and it faded,” she said. “I’ll call it the fame cloud, and it started moving past me, like it does for anyone.”

For now, Bateman dedicates much of her time to school work, with the hope that she’ll use what she learns to make entertainment more meaningful through technology.

“I guess one advantage I have over my 18-year-old self is that I really do know what I want to do for the next 10 years,” Bateman said. “I’m coming in knowing what I’ll major in or what I’ll do with it.”