Jeremy Pogue has loved roller coasters for as long as he can remember. Now, he’s equipped to work on the next one. Photo/Dani Orlando.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Jeremy Pogue, founder of Scream USC, USC’s first club for roller coaster enthusiasts. Jeremy is graduating with a degree in Computer Engineering and Computer Science and a minor in Themed Entertainment. After graduation, he will be returning to USC to pursue his master’s degree in computer engineering.
I’ve ridden 103 unique roller coasters.
There’s a picture of me in 4th grade in front of the second-tallest roller coaster in the world. It’s in a town called Sandusky in Ohio, and I dragged my parents there to take me on it. (I’m from Colorado, so it was a little bit out of the way.)
I’ve loved roller coasters for as long as I can remember. Although I’ve always wanted to work on roller coasters, I didn’t realize it would be realistic to work on them until more recently.
Fourth-grade Jeremy, already a roller coaster enthusiast, and his family in Ohio.
At USC, I fell into computer science first. I was drawn to the elegance of structured problem-solving — navigating constraints with creativity and precision while building cool things from scratch.
A few of my friends knew about the themed entertainment program here at USC — both the major and the minor — and they told me I should take a look. After all, it didn’t seem too far from what drew me to engineering in the first place. I originally didn’t think it was something I’d be able to do. It wasn’t until I looked at a syllabus for one of the classes that I thought to myself, “I need to try this out!”
Exploring themed entertainment
To me, themed entertainment is any experience that tells a story using a physical space. This can range from theme parks to escape rooms or museums, casinos, and concerts. It’s simultaneously such a niche yet broad field.
Even though I’m majoring in computer engineering and computer science at USC Viterbi, I’m minoring in themed entertainment through the School of Cinematic Arts. The themed entertainment program here is more design-focused rather than engineering-focused, so it took me a while to reconcile my two interests. But as I started exploring more of my project-based coursework in both computer science and electrical engineering, I started seeing the overlap between the two areas.
“Themed entertainment is any experience that tells a story using a physical space.”
For example, in CSCI 270, we’d talk about task scheduling algorithms.
My first thought was, “This is exactly what I do when I try to maximize my time in a theme park as a guest, looking at the queue times and figuring out which rides I should go to!” Behind the scenes, theme park operations teams also use crowd control techniques to guide visitors to maximize their enjoyment at the park
I figured I could work on an algorithm or machine learning model that would let me predict queue times and optimize a theme park visit. That turned out to be a project I’m working on this semester in CSCI 467 — using machine learning to predict queue times for Space Mountain.
The start of Scream USC, USC’s club for roller coaster enthusiasts
I’ve said that I love roller coasters and I’ve even found ways to pursue them academically, but who said the fun had to stop there?
Every month of my freshman year, I would make a pilgrimage to Six Flags. I’d just take whoever was free out of all of my friends. We’d Uber all the way there. Some of them loved it so much that they would come with me every time, and I thought, “We should find more people that love this as much as we do.” And that’s where Scream USC, USC’s club for roller coaster enthusiasts, came from.
What started as a shared passion between four friends has grown into a thriving community of over 70 members.
We’ve organized trips to local theme parks, arranged behind-the-scenes tours through industry connections, and even traveled to Las Vegas and Orlando to meet professionals working on the cutting edge of attraction design. My favorite? F.L.Y. at Phantasialand in Brühl, Germany.
Part of Scream’s mission is trying to expose people, particularly engineers, to themed entertainment and show them available career opportunities they might not have otherwise discovered. There are roles like controls engineering, which involves building systems that track ride vehicles and trigger certain elements within an attraction. For example, when a train enters a specific part of the track, the controls will activate a specific animatronic or lighting and sound sequence.
Jeremy founded Scream USC, USC’s Club for roller coaster enthusiasts. “What started as a shared passion between four friends has grown into a thriving community of over 70 members.”
Embedded systems, augmented reality, and virtual reality are everywhere in themed entertainment. There’s also plenty of research and development happening within this space. In entertainment, sometimes you’re working on characters people know and love, so one unique challenge is that what we build has to be functional but also visually representative. Spider-Man moves a certain way; I can’t just make that up!
Yet at the same time, it’s also possible for these attractions to be simple.
I once had a memorable conversation with a maintenance director at Six Flags Magic Mountain’s Gold Rusher ride about their control system. It’s just a state machine with “AND” and “OR” gates, which is something I learned about in my very first electrical engineering class freshman year . These attractions are chock-full of animatronics that require software engineering and electrical engineering. Isn’t this combination of fields so fascinating?
(Roller) coasting into the future
I’ll be back on campus this fall to pursue my master’s degree in computer engineering at USC. Before then, I’ll be interning as a software engineer at Capital One through their Technology Internship Program.
In the future, I want to make a meaningful contribution to the industry of themed entertainment in some way. I’d love to be a technical project manager or a producer for an attraction at a theme park. These roles in particular usually leave the largest footprint on the attraction. It’s their brainchild — the resulting attraction reflects them in a lot of ways.
Another way I’m interested in contributing is working on reinforcement learning and robotics to bring a better guest experience to theme parks and their attractions. Being an inventor and getting patents would be so cool! A lot of the technical elements of attractions and animatronics come from cutting-edge technology, and I’d love to drive themed entertainment from its present into its future.
Published on May 13th, 2025
Last updated on May 13th, 2025
