Christina Inge’s unlikely path is exactly why she shows up for her students every day.

By Natalie Bowers

Christina Inge was eight years old when her formal education effectively ended, and her unconventional educational journey began.

Pulled from school to care for her grandmother, who had suffered a traumatic brain injury that left her paranoid and volatile, Christina spent the next two decades managing a household, navigating chaos, and doing the one thing no one could take from her: reading. Encyclopedias. Dictionaries. Dickens. The Brontë sisters. Henry James. Ancient history. Modern history. Anything she could find. 

“Books were my refuge,” she says. “And education was my way out.”

Today, Christina Inge is a lecturer in Northeastern University’s Digital Communications and Media program and the architect of Harvard’s graduate-level certificate in AI marketing, a resume that defies easy summary and one that offers, for her students, something more valuable than a credential: proof that reinvention is not only possible, it’s the point.

The Long Road In

Christina grew up in Acton, Massachusetts, in a household shaped by brilliance and hardship in equal measure. Her grandmother had been an entrepreneur, managing properties and facilitating executive relocations, a businesswoman way ahead of her time, her drive inherited from a great-grandfather who founded a bank in Hungary. The brain injury ended all of that. What remained was a family that decided, as families sometimes do, that the caregiving would fall to the daughter. To Christina. At the age of 8, she was told she would be homeschooled, and began a life as a child caregiver. Lax homeschooling laws and lack of oversight in the 1980s turned an accident into a tragedy of a child denied a childhood. 

She was not supposed to go to college.

At 19, she found a different path. Through University of Maryland University College, one of the earliest institutions to offer degrees online. Through distance learning,  she earned her bachelor’s in English while still caregiving, fitting coursework around a household that depended on her. She finished her degree at 22. Her grandmother passed away in 2005.

“I realized then how important it is to make non-conventional paths in education accessible,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here without them. Not the person I am, not the career I have. None of it.”

From Words to Marketing to the Classroom

After graduating, Christina built a career as a journalist and writer, until the publishing industry began its long and still-ongoing disruption. She pivoted towards a chance assignment writing advertising copy, and that led to a job in market research, which then led to a role in digital marketing at a publishing company. That in turn led to a VP of Marketing position at a tech startup. Along the way, she earned a master’s in instructional technology from the University of Wyoming, again, via distance learning.

In 2010, a friend referred her to a teaching opportunity at a program affiliated with the BU Center for Digital Arts. She said yes mostly for fun.

It turned out to be a revelation.

“Education saved me,” she says. “It made my life what it is today. And I get to talk about my favorite topic,  digital marketing,  to people who are trying to do the same thing I did: build something real.”

She joined Northeastern’s faculty and, over the following years, developed Harvard’s certificate in AI marketing for the university’s graduate continuing education program, where she has taught for 12 years.

What She Actually Teaches

Christina’s courses, CMN 3800 and 3850 in the DCM program, are built around a single, practical obsession: what no one teaches you until you’re already on the job.

“Every marketing program teaches you the pieces,” she says. “SEO. The four Ps. How to write a social media post. But only when you actually start working do you learn how to run a campaign, how to make all the pieces move together.”

Her classes function as a simulation of professional life. Students build real campaigns for real organizations, learning not just tactics but judgment, how to think like a creative director, how to lead a project, how to see the whole board. Many of her students have gone on to describe it as the most practically useful course of their graduate education.

And in the age of AI, the stakes of that philosophy have only grown sharper.

“The tactical skills I built my early career on ,  copywriting, data management, content production ,  AI is taking those over,” she says matter-of-factly. “I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t prepare students for that reality. So I’ve rewritten the curriculum. We don’t just learn how to do the tasks. We learn how to lead the strategy, understand the client with genuine empathy, and know when the AI is getting it wrong, which it often does, because context is everything, and AI misses context constantly.”

What she is really teaching, she says, is human judgment. The capacity to see what the algorithm can’t.

The Thing About Caring

Christina returned to Acton several years ago to care for her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. Her mother passed away in 2020, in the second week of the COVID-19 lockdown. The timing, isolating in every possible sense, was brutal.

She speaks with particular warmth about Ed Powers, her supervisor at Northeastern, who she describes as a model of what genuine leadership looks like.

“He stepped in to help   so I could plan a funeral,” she says. “He led with what I can only call fearless kindness. That is the kind of place Northeastern is.”

When her mother was gone, Christina did what she always does: she turned outward. The day she heard the news of the Uvalde school shooting, she drove to an animal shelter and told them to give her the oldest cat  nobody wanted. They gave her Betty, a 13-year-old with a face full of grey fur and, according to Christina, an absolutely perfect personality. Betty joined a household that now includes three rescue dogs and one cat.

“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t prepare students for that reality. So I’ve rewritten the curriculum. We don’t just learn how to do the tasks. We learn how to lead the strategy, understand the client with genuine empathy, and know when the AI is getting it wrong, which it often does, because context is everything, and AI misses context constantly.”

Christina Inge

What She Wants You to Know

Christina Inge has spent her career translating hard-won experience into practical wisdom for the people she teaches. She has two pieces of advice she returns to often, drawn from a life that was supposed to go very differently:

The first: it doesn’t matter where you started. The adult education world was built for people who took unconventional paths, and that is not a consolation prize, it is the whole point.

The second: invest in your skills, not your industry. The landscape will change. It always changes. What travels with you is your ability to think, to adapt, and to understand people well enough to serve them.

She learned that from books in a house where she wasn’t supposed to be reading. She teaches it now to students who are, like she once was, looking for a way in.

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Christina Inge teaches CMN 3800: Managing Communications Projects and Campaigns and CMN 3850 in Northeastern University’s Digital and Content Marketing program. She also teaches in Harvard University’s graduate continuing education program, where she developed the certificate in AI marketing.