10 for 10: Projects that inspire
CMDI students develop their creative, analytical and investigative skills through hands-on projects that prepare them for the challenges they’ll encounter at work. Here are 10 impressive projects from the college’s first decade, along with a look at where these students are now.
Jacob Glazier (StratComm’17) worked with fellow advertising students to create CU’s commercial The Moment Before, which ran during football games and on television.
He is a freelance director and cinematographer, with some of his work gaining recognition at the Denver Film and Best Short festivals, among others.
Tessa Diestel (Jour’18) was on the 2018 Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowship team that covered “Hate in America,” which received a Murrow award, among others. The fellowship brings together top journalism students nationwide to report and produce in-depth, multimedia projects for major news outlets.
Diestel and Ashley Hopko (Jour’19) worked with students from 19 universities, reporting on hate crimes, racism and intolerance in 36 states. Diestel is currently an associate producer at ESPN.
Francesca Rubin (Comm’19) was director of partnerships for the 2019 TEDxCU event—the first time the annual speaker series was organized entirely by the college. She and her team secured sponsorships from various companies to support the event.
She is now an account executive at the fundraising consulting firm Hudson Farris, in New York City.
Megan Weber (StratComm’19) was on the Project Reface team that won gold at the national 2018 Young Ones award show organized by The One Club.
She is currently at the advertising agency McCann, in New York City, working as an art director.
Julia Muell and Megan Lange (both StratComm’21) won gold at the national 2019 Young Ones show for their Inspired World campaign.
Muell now works as an art director at Wieden + Kennedy, in New York City; Lange is a copywriter for TBWA\Chiat\Day, in Los Angeles.
Max Gannett (InfoSci’22, MS’23) and Jay Ghosh (InfoSci’22) completed a data visualization project that analyzed more than 600,000 tweets to identify target audiences of disinformation campaigns.
“The meaning and work learned on this project launched a friendship that allowed us to start a company and keep combining politics and data science to create change,” Gannett said.
That company, Washington-based Delphi Intelligence LLC, offers data science consulting services; in addition to his work with Delphi, Gannett is a special assistant in the U.S. Senate.
Audrey Mayes (MMediaSt’22) launched a podcast, Where the Aud Things Are, highlighting rural perspectives related to wildlife conservation, as the final project of her master’s program.
She then hosted Remington’s podcast as a marketing manager with the Kinetic Group before transitioning to the health and wellness space. She currently serves as the director of marketing and strategy at Lifeplus.
Reporter Hannah Prince (Jour’22) and photojournalist Alex Levy (Jour’22) investigated fentanyl use for a reporting honors project, which was published in a collaboration between the CU Independent and The Bold.
After pursuing a career in public relations, Levy switched to product marketing and is now with Zayo Group; he also runs a professional cycling program.
Prince is a segment producer of special events at ABC News, covering daily news and producing major U.S. and international news coverage. She embedded with ABC’s investigative unit in Uvalde, Texas, to report on gun violence following the 2022 school shooting, and was an associate producer for the Emmy-winning news documentary It Happened Here—A Year in Uvalde.
Jordan Wirfs-Brock (MJour’11, PhDInfoSci’22) wrote an article for Inside Energy, a collaborative journalism initiative, that includes a history of U.S. coal production set to music. She is an assistant professor of computer science at Whitman College, teaching students creative, multisensory ways to communicate data.
She is working on an NSF-funded project to develop tools that allow people to reflect on the sounds in their lives.
Virtual reality experiences in her classes inspired skiing instructor Natanya Chatfield (CritMedia’24) to create Virtual Slopes: Adaptive Ski Adventure at Eldora Mountain. The project—a first-person skiing journey for VR headsets and YouTube—makes adaptive skiing more accessible by breaking down barriers people with disabilities face in starting the sport. She is now a social media intern with a local Denver studio.
Hannah Stewart graduated from CMDI in 2019 with a degree in communication. She covers student news for the college.