Media innovation reflections: What was the best thing about your year at Medill?
In which the first Medill Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship students look back on their experience (one of a series)
Specialization
The media innovation specialization was a huge factor in me deciding to come to Medill. The program melded three different disciplines together. You have the MBA discipline of how the business side works — the engineering discipline of how everything in the background works, how to create media products and be able to code them. Then you have the journalism component: how do we write successfully, and put together a story and how do we tell a story in the right flow? This program had everything I was looking for because it was cross-disciplinary — what it takes to be a successful journalist. — Jessica Buchleitner, MSJ ’17
Leadership
I came looking to learn how to become a better leader. I think that Medill has a strong brand when it comes to journalism — but media innovation and journalism — that marks a guy marching to a different beat. We want to be innovators in this new space and time. — Devin Emory, MSJ ’17
Storytelling
Besides he media innovation experience, I’m very proud of the video skills I’ve developed. I feel like I know my way around video editing in a way that I don’t think I would have had the patience to teach myself. I’ve also boosted my data reporting skills. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at data, learning how to crunch data, build pivot tables, build stories out of that. That’s not something I had a lot of time to do before I came to Medill, so I’m pretty proud of that. — Nikolas Wright, MSJ ’17
Entrepreneurship
ShareVR was the best experience. I didn’t expect to start a real start-up in the program, but that’s what we’re doing. We took it to the (Northwestern) Garage accelerator program and formed a company. I really learned a lot working with my teammates, and their passion for VR was really inspiring to me. NUvention Web+Media requires a lot of skill sets, and I really learned a lot. This is one of the best experiences I’ve had at Medill. — Qiqi (Vivian) Zhang, MSJ ’17
Thinking about applying? Read through their experiences. See more information about the specialization, below:
Medill website | Video | Sign up for Medill Media Innovation newsletter | Rich Gordon’s guest column (Entrepreneurial Journalism Educators Network)
