In the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design, you’ll learn how to generate ideas and solve problems for brands and issues through a design thinking process that is grounded in analytical and creative thought.
With the explosion of digital and social media, there’s never been a more exciting time to work in the rapidly growing field of strategic communication.
Undergraduate Opportunities
We offer a bachelor’s degree in Strategic Communication—an umbrella term that refers to the way in which organizations use advertising, public relations and media design to accomplish their communication goals. Outside of class, you’ll have many opportunities to showcase your work. For example, our students consistently take top awards in the prestigious international One Show "Young Ones" competition in New York City.
Our graduates have exciting careers such as senior vice president of brand advertising and communications at T-Mobile, executive creative director at DDB California, head of brand communications at PayPal and brand communication director at Nike.
As an undergraduate student you can choose to specialize in one of three areas:
A career in advertising will draw upon your capacity for analysis and imagination. Advertising is a dynamic and exciting field that offers opportunities in a range of areas, including creative and strategic roles. Students will prepare for careers that allow them to capitalize on their passions, talents, and ambitions.
The advertising tracks require students to specialize in one of two areas: advertising creative and advertising strategy.
The Public Relations track will prepare you for a career in one of the nation’s fastest-growing fields. Career opportunities within public relations include—but are not limited to—the roles of publicist, copywriter, event planner, social media manager, and spokesperson.
In this program, you will learn to work closely with news organizations, build relationships with media and other stakeholders, create content for traditional and emerging media platforms—including social media—and manage public relations campaigns.
Media Design track is the application of design thinking and design practices to create the targeted touchpoints of strategic communication for modern media in a commercial context, such as social media strategies, packaging design, app development, and user experience. The Media Design track provides the methods and processes to solve a strategic communication problem, the experience and understanding to design an original concept, and the skills and best practices to bring those concepts to life. In the past year alone, 25 media design students made the One Show finals, with 12 students earning pencils, the impressive One Show awards. Our graduates are employed as digital producers, social media managers, app designers, graphic designers, user experience strategists and interaction designers.
Graduate Programs
We offer graduate degrees for students interested in furthering their professional careers and for students who wish to expand the frontiers of knowledge in our discipline by producing scholarship and research at the highest level.
The MACC is an online professional master’s degree designed to train working professionals in skills needed for an increasingly globalized corporate environment, including business, governmental and non-governmental organizations.
In the 21st century’s connected economy, design increasingly plays a strategic role in communications––from its impact on local everyday engagements to global change. Whether the end result is a product, service or branded experience, this program focuses on the delivery of useful, desired, and strategically impactful results effected by design-driven innovation.
This program helps students become experts in cutting edge digital advertising techniques and learn how to find, create and analyze advertising data. Students leave the program ready to work in analytical roles at digital advertising agencies, DSPs, DMPs, programmatic shops and digital marketing departments.
The program emphasizes analyzing how organizations—governments, non-profits, and corporations—build and maintain relationships by using advertising and public relations. To this end, the program helps students understand how organizations do, and should, understand and align their activities to their socio-economic, media, and cultural environments.
This program emphasizes how theory informs practice, critically analyzing how advertising and public relations operate in ways that can—or could—constructively contribute to the successful, ethical, and resilient functioning of society. The objective is to produce scholar-teachers and researchers who understand how organizations of different types intentionally build and maintain sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships with their strategic publics within different socio-cultural environments through the use of advertising and public relations.
