How often do people get hired with degrees that...are completely different than your average applicants?
Ie person is fresh out of college with a B.S. in Geology, but wants to go into game design and has no experience in the gaming industry.
Not Riot related, but IRL it's totally common to get a job in something that's different then what you got a degree in.
Great question. I encourage you to check out the LinkedIn group we've got, they cover a lot of questions like this!
Quick answer however is that degrees vary widely at Riot and not all people come in doing the work that they hold a degree in. There are tons of other criteria that are considered including things such as skill set and passion. I'm not an authority in any of this though so feel free to jump into that group, Rioters answer questions there pretty often!
It's definitely been known to happen. I believe Ghostcrawler majored in Marine Biology. One thing I hear a lot is to work on making projects to show you can do the work. Good luck!
I'm going to be majoring in Materials Science Engineering and I'm still applying for Riot's internship program. I even found out that WizardCrab was a fellow MSE before he joined up at Riot, which was really cool for me and just goes to show that a major does not have to limit you to that specific field :)
If I may suggest, try looking for ways to apply what you've learned to various game design areas. For me, I found that material assignments and visual properties in modeling are actually really close to what I'm learning now, and so I'm falling in love with learning Blender and Autodesk Maya paralleled with my curriculum =D
