Master of Arts in Media and Strategic Communication

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If you want to know what’s going on around Grand Rapids, just ask Carlos Lemagne.     Carlos started three months ago as the convention marketing and editorial manager for Experience Grand Rapids, a destination marketing organization for Grand Rapids and Kent County.     “I get to look at all the marketing efforts for conventions and meetings,” he said. “I still work in the marketing department, so we do all the leisure things for the city, but what I focus on is the promotion of meetings and conventions, trying to make it appealing to corporations and meeting planners at the national level to come and host their meetings here. I also work on the editorial side. All the content that gets put out on our web gets orchestrated in a way by me, so I work with our copywriters and all our partners.”     Carlos graduated from Calvin with a double major in business marketing and music in 2021, then went on to get his master’s degree in communication and media studies from Calvin in 2022. He was hoping to get into other related areas of marketing, such as PR and advertising.      “The program really had a focus I liked very much, which was a managerial focus,” he said. “You touch on the major areas like advertising, PR, analytics, and storytelling, but you do all that so you are able to develop a strategy lens.”     He was working full time for Calvin as a program coordinator while pursuing his master’s degree, and said he appreciated the willingness of the professors to be flexible. Many of the master’s degree students have full-time jobs or families, and it isn’t always easy to fit everything in.     “I was truly grateful for the adaptability and flexibility that the faculty and advising team offered,” he said. #MMSC #Calvingrad #calvinalumni #communication

After graduating in 2022 with her master’s degree in media and strategic communication, Arianna Koeman brought her love of health and fitness to a new career as a digital content coordinator. Arianna is part of a two-person marketing team at MVP Sports Clubs, where she does social strategy, web design, copywriting, flyer design, digital displays, and “anything we have in the club for events,” she says. “I’m in charge of all of that, from design to display.” Social media is also a big part of her job. She’s the content creator, photographer, videographer, editor, and does audio. “I’m pretty much the jack of all trades here,” she said. She’s always been into fitness, and said her job is “a perfect blend of all my interests and allows me to be super creative with what I do day to day.” She said her bachelor’s degree in communication gave her a broad understanding of the concepts, but she continued her education because a lot of the jobs she was looking at required either a lot of experience or a master’s degree. The master’s program has a unique environment where you’re working with real clients as you would in an agency, but you’re getting supportive feedback from professors at the same time, she said. “In my job, there’s sometimes not a lot of time for feedback on a project. I just have to do it and push it out and hope that it was great,” she said. “In the graduate program, I was able to get feedback in a safe environment that was super constructive and really helpful.” “Working with real companies and real clients all the way through is so helpful. I was able to take a portfolio that I made, mostly of agency work, directly to my interviews, and that’s definitely what secured my job.” #MMSC #calvingradschool #calvinuniversityalumni #strategiccommunication

We're happy to support the work of the WMPRSA - West Michigan Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America ]. We're looking forward to the upcoming PRoof Awards!

As an art director at Doner, a Detroit-based full-service advertising agency, Simon Post has crafted ads for familiar names like Fairlife, Hungry Howie’s, Zyrtec, Meijer, and Listerine.    Simon was part of the first cohort to graduate with the MMSC degree from Calvin in December 2021.     “I joined the program because I knew it would get me better experience, better connections, and a better portfolio to land a job in advertising, which is not easy to do,” he said.    He said an art director needs to possess two main skill sets, with the most obvious being art skills. But the second, and more important, is the ability to take a problem and put a creative spin on it to solve it.    “In the master’s program, and at Calvin as a whole, problem solving is really emphasized,” he said. “The master’s program was great at teaching me to analyze a situation and use creativity or my communication skills to essentially solve it.”    His work with Skylight, Calvin’s student-run media agency, was some of the best training he had for his position, he said. At Skylight, clients come in with a product or service they want to advertise, and the MMSC students create advertising for it.    “Getting the chance to be strategically creative in a controlled environment was one of the greatest advantages of the master’s program,” he said. “Anyone can be creative or entertaining, but to be creative while also working within the confines of clients who have demands and expectations that they need is difficult. I’d be lying if I said I had it all figured out, but the master’s program was an incredible incubator for me to get a head start.” 

MMSC students in COMM 520 spent this semester representing their client, Calvin's The January Series. Each student prepared their own PR campaign proposals using the RPIE method. This immersive experience required them to conduct discovery work for their client, prepare a survey for faculty/staff, and as a result of that survey craft objectives, tactics, and budgets/schedules. At the end of the semester, The January Series, received 5 unique proposals + multimedia asset samples. Here they are presenting their proposals! #MMSC #Calvingrad #thejanuaryseries

If you’ve seen any news stories lately about the Gerald R. Ford International Airport, you can thank Heidi Groenboom. The Calvin grad is a communication and events associate for the airport authority, where she does media interviews during busy travel seasons, shares stories about construction at the airport, and supports crisis communications. Her job also involves overseeing advertising campaigns, writing speaking remarks for the authority president, and writing and pushing out press releases. “It’s different every day, and that’s what I wanted,” she said. She was looking for a job where she wasn’t doing the same thing over and over and said she’s “grateful to have gotten it with a crazy job at the airport.” Heidi graduated with her bachelor’s degree in strategic communication and writing, with a focus on business communication. After finishing her bachelor’s degree, she enrolled in the new MMSC program. She said the master’s program was very different from the undergrad program. It was much more project-based, and involved a lot of working together with other students. They all brought different strengths to the table and felt like a real team working in a real business, she said. “I am grateful to have had a well-rounded MMSC cohort of five students, all with our own separate skills. You’re learning how to work together,” she said. “Definitely some of that transferred over into my job now. I’m working with our engineers, terminal supervisors, all these different types of people, while also working on marketing and my own goals.” She said her relationships with her professors has greatly helped in her career. “I felt like they were my colleagues, wanting me to thrive while also providing advice and grading my papers. Almost every single professor I came across, I loved what they had to say, and I so appreciated their relationships.”

In his new job as a digital marketing specialist at Packaging Compliance Labs, Benjamin Brushaber is gearing up to start an email marketing campaign while also managing incoming marketing leads and working on the company’s blog. But the skill that landed him the job in February was his background in film production. He’ll be helping to draw up a marketing and social media video strategy for the Grand Rapids company, which does packaging testing for the medical packaging industry. Before starting at Packaging Compliance Labs, he was a video editor and part of a multimedia team at Service Express, working on all aspects of the production process. Benjamin enrolled in Calvin’s MMSC program after graduating with his bachelor’s degree in film and media production in the fall of 2020. “The whole experience in the program was absolutely incredible,” he said. “It was a really great opportunity for me to get more experience in other areas of communication and media that I didn’t have the experience in as just a film student.” He said the coursework helped him get an in-depth understanding of all the different aspects of communication and how they overlapped. Working in the program’s Skylight Media agency gave him great hands-on experience branching out into those different areas. He said his MMSC professors are still checking in with him to see how things are going, and he appreciates their continued interest in his career. “They’re not invested in you only when you’re a student; they’re definitely 100 percent invested in you as an alumni, reaching out to see if there’s a way they can support you. It was really comforting, going into this new aspect of my career, that I can lean on that support.” #digitalmarketing #filmstudents #strategiccommunication #emailmarketingstrategy #recentgraduates #calvinuniversity

Share your story with us as a grad student in Calvin’s Master of Arts in Media and Strategic Communication Program! #media #strategiccommunication #professionalgrowth #gradschool #gradstudent #calvinuniversity Alexis Bradley Master of Arts in Media and Strategic Communication

Good marketing involves a lot of storytelling, and that’s what drew Abigail León to her role as a marketing coordinator at Quinn Evans, an architectural firm in Washington D.C. In her job at Quinn Evans, she writes proposals that help bring work to the firm, making sure she communicates to potential clients the skills and services the firm’s architects can bring to their project. She was interested in the job because the company likes to use stories in their proposals to talk about the communities that they’re designing structures for. “They’re very much people-centered,” she said. “I was drawn to the way we can tell stories not only to win work for the firm… but for the people on the outside looking in, to look at the places they’re living and working in, and constantly engaging with, and see there is an intentional story behind it.” Leon was a member of the first cohort to graduate with a Master of Arts in Media and Strategic Communication from Calvin University in 2021, and she said the degree helped her gain stronger messaging skills to go with the production skills she learned as an undergrad. She said her background in #digitalcommunication was very heavily production based. “I could do all of the technical skills - graphic design, computer science, film and media – but I didn’t necessarily know the strategy behind who you’re messaging to and the communities you’re trying to reach,” she said. “It’s really important to have not only the #productionskills that I had coming out of Calvin and from all my internships, but then also continuing into the MMSC to get that strategy and to be able to talk about those stories in a way that is tailored to the specific communities and people we’re trying to bring our services to.” Calvin University Graduate School #calvinalumni #communicationstrategy #masterprogram #graduatestudents #communicationstudents