What Does This Have to Do with My Career?

What does this have to do with my career? This is a question many professors face during the semester. It is hard for students who have never worked in a corporate environment to see the application of their classes to their life beyond Clemson. Ashley Cowden, Coordinator of Clemson’s Client-Based Program and Mike Dorsch, Professor of Marketing, are striving to answer this question in their interdisciplinary collaborative project with the Rutland Institute for Ethics (RIE).

 The project involves two separate courses, a graduate marketing management seminar course and an undergraduate technical writing course, whose responsibility is to conduct research among RIE’s internal and external supporters and programs. The goal of the research is to determine how to increase participants in RIE programs and increase donations to RIE. Besides helping RIE, the educational purpose of the effort is to provide students with a hand-on experience related to the challenges associated with creating and managing a collaborative project involving managers and employees who are geographically separated from each other.

The primary learning outcomes from the project are to understand the difficulties associated with effectively managing the complexities associated with creating and maintaining a collaborative team-based work environment in a real-world like setting. The client-based project engaged students in the entire process, encouraging them to apply the classroom material in a meaningful way. For example, in their role as corporate leaders, the graduate students were responsible for defining and creating an organizational culture that emphasized collaboration; determining client needs; designing a project design (i.e., survey and recommendation report) to satisfy client needs; gaining client support of the project concept; and, to work with their employees to prepare and deliver the final report and presentation to the client. The graduate students were also responsible for soliciting, “hiring”, motivating, supervising, and evaluating employees (undergraduates). Finally, the graduate students were charged with communicating effectively with their employees and to develop an approach for resolving conflicts among managers and/or employees. The undergraduate students were responsible for applying to work for a specific project teams. Once “hired,” the undergraduate students were responsible for assisting in planning the research design and project timeline; conducting research to create the survey questions; collecting and analyzing the data; scheduling and completing their assignments to fit the project timeline; contributing effectively to a team; communicating effectively with management regarding the progress and difficulties associated with the project; presenting their project and delivering a finished report to the client; and, evaluating management.

The innovativeness of the project relates to a desire to simulate a work environment that is as close as possible to a real-world setting, and our approach may be the first of its kind in the nation. In our simulated environment, the graduate students become project managers who are charged with interacting with the client, hiring their project-management teams, designing the features to be included in their research design and managing their teams to create the survey and recommendation report. Whereas as the undergraduates are the technical experts who are assigned to work with management to complete a high quality deliverable. An added dimension to the simulated real-world work environment is that the two courses meet in different cities (Greenville and Clemson) at different days and times. The distance aspect of the course exposed students to the difficulty of completing a collaborative project when the workgroups are in different locations and the need to determine effective communication and management strategies that extend beyond meeting face-to-face. This work context is similar to one that many students are likely to experience in their working lives.

Students are able to gain communication and managerial skills that they will use in their respective careers after Clemson. The students participating in our collaborative project are truly seeing how these skills will be applied in their lives beyond Clemson. The experience is of interest to prospective employers as evident by the feedback we received from our students. As Universities continue to prepare students for their career, increasing attention is being placed on the development of “know-how” knowledge and skills. Our collaborative course is one approach for helping students to convert their understanding of concepts learned in a classroom to a technical understanding that can be applied successfully in practice. In this way, we can better prepare our students to excel in their chosen career paths.

**Article from Ashley Cowden and Michael Dorsch on the Business & Technical Writing program joint project with MBA Marketing students.