Five Reasons Why You Should Take Entrepreneurship and Media of the Future

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By Maria Holt 

The whole group with Professor McCombs and Judy Diaz (the Client) in front of Twin Cities Public Television in the St. Paul Skywalk.

 

If you are interested in business strategy or entrepreneurship, this class is a great opportunity to apply your skills to a real company. Here are my top five reasons why this class is amazing:

Top 5 Reasons This Class Is Amazing:

1. Both Journalism and MBA students take the class.

The class is split between journalism and business students (and professors), which makes it very interesting. As a business student, I didn’t know very much about the media industry going into the project. My journalism group members didn’t know a whole lot about crafting a start-up plan – adding the two sets of knowledge together really helped us create a neat solution.

2. It’s more of an experience and less like a class.

The class actually culminates in a competition where student teams present solutions  to a panel of judges during the Digital Globe Symposium in the Reynolds Journalism Institute, which by itself, makes the class unique. But the experience is so much more than that – it’s akin to spending a semester in the board room with your client, solving their problem together.

3. The professors are great mentors.

The professors set this course up as an experience that they can mentor you through rather than a class that they teach you.  They go out of their way to provide tools, speakers and opportunities to explore and develop. You really get a lot out of the class if you take advantage of even just a few of the many opportunities. Each professor brings a unique background and lots of relevant industry experience. You can tell that they all really care about you as a student, too – they want to get to know the students in the class and help them in any way they can – including finding jobs, internships, and other opportunities outside of class.

4. The clients you work with are unique and inspiring.

Clients this semester include: The Associated Press who wants to reach a younger audience with their app; Nations Media (which is the largest media group in Eastern Africa) who wants to digitize the archive of their paper going back 50 years; Next Avenue – a project for Twin Cities Public Television that is focused on bringing valuable information to baby boomers as they face the next avenues in their life; Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) which wants to increase its listeners; ANDAC – which is a mid-west conglomeration of local newspapers trying to figure out how to sell their stories to other organizations; Treeple – a project centered around a  responsive software that delivers highly customized news stories around health and well-being.

5. The solutions that the teams come up with have a lasting impact.

In some cases, the solutions change the direction of companies. The work you do means so much more than a grade, especially to the companies. We are helping to craft strategies, revenue models and solutions that the clients really need – that’s why they are here. The project is collaborative with the client – they help us develop the solution. In fact, most teams in the class get to travel to its client’s headquarters and have on-site meetings.  Seeing the impact we have had on our client is, by-far, the biggest reason I love this class.

For more information about this year’s competition, visit http://www.rjionline.org/events/cdigsymposium

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Maria Holt is an MBA student at the University of Missouri. As a Marketing Coordinator for EPIC Systems, Inc., an engineering firm in St. Louis, Missouri, she is responsible for the firm’s emerging marketing projects. She is a 2010 graduate of the Trulaske College of Business with a B.S. in Business Management. 

Spotlight on Entrepreneurship and Media of the Future

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Entrepreneurship and Media of the Future is a course that provides students with hands-on experience tackling business challenges for different companies around the world.  Paul Westman, who is currently enrolled in the course, provides more insight into the course below.

Entrepreneurship and Media of Future is a three-credit hour class that is offered once a week in the evening. The objective of the course is to combine both students in both Journalism and Business to collaborate and create a business plan for real businesses to be used for implementation. The class is broken up into teams (usually about 4-6 students per team) and each team presents its business plan at a symposium at the end of the year, where a winner will be chosen. Students in the class are exposed to real-world issues and they serve as real consultants to their respective company.

The company I have been working with throughout the semester is the Associated Press (AP). The AP is one of the largest and most trusted news outlet in the world. Our team’s objective has been to create a marketing plan for AP’s new mobile app. Specifically; AP wanted us to create a plan that is focused on the college demographic at the University of Missouri. This way, if our plan proves to be successful, it can be duplicated at other similar colleges on a national scale.

Another great component of the class is that each team gets the opportunity to travel to the headquarters of the company it is assigned to. My team recently traveled to New York City to visit AP’s headquarters. The experience was unforgettable in many ways. First, we stayed in a hotel in downtown New York City and walked to the AP building each morning, which allowed us all to experience the hustle and bustle of the NYC lifestyle first-hand. Once we got to AP’s headquarters each morning, we were escorted to the top floor of the building (the executive level), where we were stationed throughout the day. AP set up an itinerary for our team each day, where AP employees/managers from different departments came in and spoke to us about their specific roles in the company. We also got a full tour of the building and we were able to see all aspects of the company, including the live newsroom. Finally, our team presented our marketing plan to multiple upper-level executives in the company, who were all very impressed with all the work we had done.

This course added a tremendous amount of value to my MBA experience. As a student, it was such an unforgettable experience to present in front of executive management in downtown New York City. Further, I can walk away from the class knowing that I helped contribute to a value-adding marketing plan for a successful global company. As a straight-through student, this class was able to provide real-world consulting experience that I can take with me when I start my career in the business world. As a result, I have been able to strengthen my presentation, teamwork, consulting, writing, and problem solving skills throughout the semester due to the Entrepreneurship and Media of the Future course.

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Originally from Chesterfield, MO, Paul Westman earned his undergraduate degree in Marketing at the University of Missouri and continued on as a straight-though student into the Crosby MBA Program.  Paul will graduate from the Crosby MBA Program in May 2013 with a concentration in Management.

 

 

Spotlight on the Association of Trulaske Businesswomen

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March is Women’s History Month, and so the Crosby MBA Blog reached out to Brittnea Collins, president of the Association of Trulaske Businesswomen, to find out more about the organization and what kind of experience it offers to its members.

I’m Brittnea Collins, an MBA candidate scheduled to graduate in December of 2013.  Though I have no concentration, my work background is in marketing and management.  I have thoroughly enjoyed interacting with my peers through the many other beneficial organizations that the Trulaske College of Business offers.  I noticed, however, that there was no organization that focused on the diverse challenges that women (and men!) face in the professional sphere, or how the personal sphere affects a woman’s career.

With the encouragement and support of Drs. Schnatterly and Marinova, I started the Association of Trulaske Businesswomen (ATB) in the spring semester of 2012, and I currently serve as president.  ATB is a group that focuses on women in business; more specifically, on identifying and exploring the unique perspectives and experiences that women face in the business world.  A consistent theme of our meetings is examining how social structures affect the ways that women and men interact in a professional environment.

We typically meet twice a month (dates and times are varied), and everyone is both welcome and encouraged to come.   We often host speakers to lead discussion-oriented sessions; most recently we invited Paula Elias and Kerri Yost, founders of the local Citizen Jane Film Festival, to speak about women’s representation in media.  Some of our members also took part in a “Women in Leadership Day” that featured women from Boeing to address the need for women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.

ATB is an extremely useful and important tool for anyone, whether s/he is a business student, a working professional, and/or anyone else!  We address issues that are dynamic and that affect not just women but men as well.  Additionally, the organization is unique in that in every meeting we share our personal thoughts, opinions, and experiences about these issues.  We are thus able not only to learn from the perspectives of those different from us but also are able to relate those people and their perspectives.

If you are a current student in the Trulaske College of Business and are interested in learning more about the Association of Trulaske Businesswomen, post a comment below, and we will add you to the club’s mailing list!