Content Strategy 2016 to 2018— Best Of
Two years of studying Content Strategy at FH Joanneum have brought around many memorable moments and experiences. Here’s the four of them that stuck with me the most.
When I started in the class of 2016 in the Master’s program for Content Strategy, I thought I had an idea of how all of this was going to turn out. After all, I had already completed my Bachelor’s in Journalism and PR at the department of media and design at FH Joanneum. I knew what I was getting into. The Master’s Degree for Content Strategy is part of that very same department. I even already knew Heinz Wittenbrink, Jutta Pauschenwein and Robert Gutounig from the time when I was studying to get my first degree.
And then I got accepted for the Master’s program, and so many things that happened genuinely surprised me. Enough things to compile a list of best of moments. A list of things that — despite the program being very new (it is currently about to start its fifth class) and its thus very fluid ways of organizing — can hopefully give you an outlook of what you can expect when you’re thinking of starting a degree like mine.
#1 Finally Meeting Everyone in Person
When you start studying Content Strategy at FH Joanneum in Graz (which is btw the second largest city in Austria, and it is packed with students), you are signing up for a part-time degree, which runs over wide stretches on online lectures, so you can study from anywhere. And I am all for that.
However, you can surely imagine the most obvious trade off. You would not get the typical feeling of sitting in a class with your peers, getting to know them at a face to face meeting. It can feel like you’re on your own on a remote island at times. Sure, you would have your online community, led by Jutta Pauschenwein. And that surely does help. Really. But I am someone that would rather sit down with you for a coffee and talk than spending my time typing in chatrooms. So I could not wait for the first presence week to start and finally meet everyone.
In the program, you get to meet your class in person four times a semester. Twice for a full week, twice for a weekend. You’ll sit in class like a regular student, you’ll have marathons (up to ten hours) of lectures and learn stuff like content audits over to little pieces of coding, brand messaging, UX design, community management and communications science and project management.
But most of all, you’ll finally meet these “online people” in the flesh, you’ll notice they’re smarter than some online posts would have made them look like, they all bring unique experiences to the table, some have the same weird sense of humor that you got, while others just plainly wreck your nerves the entire time.
The full experience, it’s all there all of a sudden. We’ve had people:
- like me who just finished their Bachelor’s and were looking for their
first full-time job - with 15+ years of professional experience
- who endured 12 hour train rides to get to Graz. Every. Single. Time.
(I’m looking at you there, Fraenzi) - who run their own business and/or are raising their kids
(this just never stops to amaze me) - who work in politics, in community service, in advertising, in tech
(I am sure I forgot something here)
…and that’s just my own class. The list could go on and on. I made some great friends in the past two years. Some of them even live here in Munich now. So no more remote-island-feeling.
#2 Coming Back to Graz
That’s an easy one. I’ve lived in Graz for three years. I moved away when I got my job in Munich. And I missed this small city. Graz has roughly 300.000 residents, it is buzzing with students (when it’s not the holidays), main square in summer feels like Italy, it has an interesting art community, and the city parks are just beautiful to hang out at. Any city has its drawbacks, but I really enjoyed living in Graz. In fact, to me the city feels like it an oversized living room. That’s surely romanticized, but I still like coming back.
#3 Traveling to London and Berlin
I got to admit, it is quite cool to be part of a program that allows you to travel and build a network. In 2017, my entire class and I traveled to London to meet with our speakers — Rahel Bailie, Lisa Moore (who organized the whole thing) and Roger Sheen — and visited organizations like Facebook (where we met Mike Atherton), The Museum of London or Government Digital Services. All of them do impressive stuff within the realms of Content Strategy. And we were in the front row, asking the people working there all the questions we could come up with.
Oh and did I mention that our courses in that week were run at Digitas UK, work on real-life projects included? We got work with and get feedback from really busy, but really great people in strategy, UX, design and communications. What more can you ask for?
Well, there is more. A year later, we got to do another trip. This time to Berlin. And again, we met with Annika Geisel at Facebook (at that time deep down the Cambridge Analytica rabbit hole), asked the people at Mozilla what they are up to and learned more about the work of the creators of the CMS Contentful. Also, we met Roger Sheen again, who gave us a tour at Wire, we met with Tom Levine at C3 and got to know more about the inner workings of a major content agency network in Europe and finally we discussed digital policies with Volker Tripp from Digitale Gesellschaft.
In short: This program makes you go places, it makes you meet people you can learn a lot from. I surely did.
#4 Creating Value
When you’re studying at a university of applied sciences, you’re always told how hands-on the lectures are, how many projects you’ll get to work on, how closely tied each course is to the industry and “oh my god, the network you’re going to build”. After almost five years at FH Joanneum I have to admit — it is true.
I mean — if #3 wouldn’t already be enough, every semester in this program brought around a new project we either way got to work on alone, in groups or even as a whole class. Together with my peers:
- I got to work for a small fashion label in the middle of Styria (Sonja and I wrote a couple of articles on this — #1, #2, #3)
- Ran a ridiculously detailed community analysis for OK Maps
(a couple of people working at the University of Graz who want to make research easier for everyone) - Competed in small groups (within the class) and each made a pitch on how to best go about a website relaunch for Universalmuseum Joanneum
- Finally kicked off my Master Thesis for Timeular by diving head first into concrete business problems, and thinking about how Content Strategy can help solve them. Sonja and I are still working on it. It’s going to be great. Interest in how we’re doing? Luckily, there’s another blog post for that.
And the best part about this is you don’t just work on a paper to get your grades, only for it to disappear somewhere in a drawer later on, without anything of your recommendations being executed. No. The stuff you learn and put into practice here actually creates value for the people you’re giving your inputs to. This is not a drill. The people you’re writing for here are your clients. And while you may not see everything you do bear fruit, everyone I worked with at least turned pieces of what I recommended into reality.
To me, knowing how my work helped someone go off and build something or made them able to fix a certain problem is a way better feeling than any straight A on an exam could ever give me.
And yeah, sure, it does feel good to finally hand something in and lay back a little. But this feeling of creating something that helps someone do better, that’s exactly what you get when you’re working with determination on a project in this program. It’s not just “Hey, you did well on this, now move on”. It’s rather “Hey, what you did here was useful for me, thanks.”
Would I do it again?
Yeah. I would. But I would take myself a little less seriously. I would try not to get angry anymore when I felt organization was too loose. I would not stress about how time could have been better used during certain presence weeks. I would certainly start working on my papers earlier (haha, yeah right). I would still enjoy the overwhelming majority of the projects I got to work on. And I would most likely be right in the middle of endless group chats during online lectures, trying to understand (or not) what was actually going on in a course with this lot:
The point is: It’s been good.
Thanks to everyone who made it that way.
