Alumna casts reality TV shows using her degree in psychology

Over 35 million Americans have never left the state that they were born in. Porsha, a 32-year-old Georgia resident, used to be one of them. She’d never gone beyond the perimeter of Atlanta despite working for an airline, cleaning planes. This year, with the help of Emily Sweet, head of talent and casting at the video network Tastemade, Porsha crossed state lines and dipped her toes in the ocean for the first time.

Sweet, who graduated with a degree in psychology from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 2007, selected Porsha to appear on Tastemade and Hyundai’s series The Un-Adventurers. The show takes people outside their home state for new experiences, like a boat ride or a chance to perform stand-up comedy. 

For Sweet, working with people like Porsha keeps her dedicated to the craft of unscripted TV. “We can help somebody change their life in a way that they couldn’t on their own, or tell a story that hasn’t been told before,” she says. 

After graduating from USC Dornsife, Sweet steadily climbed her way up the casting ladder, from a casting associate to a casting producer to her current role at Tastemade. She says her psychology degree has proved essential to her work, which requires her to select just the right raw talent to partake in often stressful on-screen challenges. 

“My education helps me understand how people are going to handle certain situations, how they’re likely to react. You know what people’s coping mechanisms are, can identify their insecurities and triggers,” she explains. “All of these things really help you to envision how they’re going to operate in a cast. It also helps you to figure how you’re going to set this person up for success during the casting process.”

Hollywood psychology 

Rewind a few years and you might have expected Sweet to be the one on screen. She’s played the harp since she was 6, took jazz dance classes and performed in numerous plays. She even acted in a commercial for a cable TV package, although she confesses she’s never actually watched the final ad. 

Her main career inspiration, though, was her mother, a child psychologist. As a senior in high school, Sweet knew she wanted to major in the subject herself and began looking at colleges. One visit to the USC campus convinced her it was home. 

“I’ll never forget this: My family and I parked at the parking garage near New North and we had to park on the roof. We get out of the car and walk to the edge of the parking structure, and there’s that view: the quad, the fountains, the libraries. We were all like, ‘Oh my gosh, how did we not know this was here.’” 

As an undergraduate, Sweet tackled her psychology classes along with a Spanish minor. She got to apply both interests when she worked on a research study tracking levels of stress hormones in Spanish-speaking caregivers for dementia patients. Sweet traveled around the city to the study’s participants, performing evaluations in Spanish and collecting saliva samples. 

Sweet on graduation day in 2007.

While at USC, her mother’s network of work contacts led her to Richard Levak, a psychologist who helped cast reality shows like Survivor and The Apprentice. Close proximity to Hollywood and her degree focus made Sweet a good fit as an assistant, which she took on while also enrolled in a full course load. 

“My USC Dornsife professors were really supportive. They worked with me to make sure I could do my school work but also have this career opportunity,” says Sweet. By the time she graduated, she’d made enough contacts in the industry to launch her career in casting.

Star-crossed Trojans

Her connection to the Trojan Family has been further fortified by her husband, a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

“We went on our first date and realized we both went to USC, although not at the same time. After date three or four, we realized that we had both lived in the same apartment building, and then we figured out that we had lived in the same bedroom of that same apartment,” she recounts.

When Sweet’s not deploying her psychology training to cast starring roles, she and her husband take off to the mountain tops to observe stars of a more heavenly nature, photographing the night skies that twinkle above Hollywood.

Screening for success

Reality TV has its critics, but Sweet remains a stalwart supporter. “I think it’s never a bad thing to give somebody a platform to move their life, their business or their hopes and dreams to the next level,” says Sweet. 

She cites The Great Food Truck Race, which she cast, and which has propelled numerous small business owners to success, like Ted Kim, Kim Young and Chris Oh who won season three. The trio now operate the Seoul Sausage Co., and have formed a catering contract with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum where attendees can try their signature sausage sandwiches topped with kimchi relish.

She’s also worked on more sensitive projects, like Extreme Weight Loss. “You really have to be a shoulder to lean on for these people. There’s a lot of emotional reasons for why people go on these shows,” she explains.

In these moments, she says, she’s always grateful for her training in psychology at USC Dornsife that enables her to get people to open up, authentically. “You have to connect with people and you have to make them feel comfortable. You help them understand that their story is important and then help them to tell it in in the best way.”.