Dive summary:
- A common problem among undergraduate degrees is that they do not properly prepare students for the real life responsibilities needed to land a great job in marketing; that's why employees marketing community nonprofit thinkLA launched M-School, Los Angeles' first advertising school.
- The team from thinkLA teamed up with the business school at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in central LA to create a program focused on real life skills students would need to land jobs in advertising and marketing.
- The program focuses on introducing students to people at companies, like Google, where the students want to land when they graduate; the program also requires students to do hands on projects where they have to create a product from scratch and then perform all the steps to market it.
From the article:
"Over the course of the semester, students also work in teams to develop a final project, kind of like a hands-on thesis, which they present to the class at the close of term. The assignment this year is to re-imagine the TV dinner for the modern age. Last year the students were given spaghetti strainers and told to make a completely new product out of them. One group created a special bar stool with a colander strapped to the bottom of the cushion so patrons could flip up the seat and empty their phone, keys, and wallet into it to keep their pockets from bulging uncomfortably while they sat.
Not only did the students have to do the branding and develop the product concept, they had to do the P&L, packaging, creative, media vehicles, strategy, marketing plan—the works."
