Hood College intends to offer new major in the Fall of 2013

 

Integrated Marketing Major
By: Meghan Burket
Hood College is in the midst of creating a major that will cater to students interested in public relations and marketing, Hood faculty said.
The projected curriculum will provide a major called Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). If the major is approved by the full faculty and the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC), it will be offered in the fall semester of 2013, Hood faculty said.
Management instructor, professor Van Winter and communication arts instructor, professor Bertazzoni has played key roles in the development of the program. Most of the classes are 300 and 400 level courses. “It’s a hefty major,” Bertazzoni said.
The coursework will entail public relations, marketing, and social media classes. Each student will be required to enroll in communication law, seminar in media issues, and complete an internship experience, Bertazzoni said. 
The major is an option for Hood students because there are people who are interested in the communication arts degree and the marketing degree, but do not want to double major, Van Winter said. “The more integrated firms become the more important it is for students to have management and public relations backgrounds to make them more marketable,” Bertazzoni said.
After a student graduates from Hood with a degree in IMC, they will be prepared for jobs such as, marketing management, public relations, sales promotion and brand management, Van Winter said. “The integrated marketing major will enable students to focus on an area of growing importance to organizations: the need to coordinate communications to a company’s customers,” he said.
Bertazzoni and Van Winter created the curriculum by researching IMC majors that are offered by top schools in the country. They wanted the major that would be crafted for Hood to include all of the courses typically found within the IMC major, Van Winter said. By doing this research, the instructors discovered the only course that was not offered by Hood College already was a course in social media, he said.
Therefore, a course in social media has been proposed and is awaiting approval. The course would be taught by professor David Gurzick. The development of this curriculum is anticipated to take students away from both communications and business majors, Bertazzoni said. “We have predicted a midsize major of 30 to 35 students who declare the major, but who knows,” she said.
Van Winter believes the major is more “balanced” compared to similar integrated marketing programs offered at Towson, Stevenson, or UMD. “The Towson and Stevenson programs are housed in the communications departments and are dominated by communications courses. The UMD program is housed in the business school, and is business course heavy. The Hood program is a balanced program, jointly housed by communications, economics and business administration departments,” he said.
The major is still awaiting approval from the full Hood faculty, although, the major has been approved by the curriculum committee. Currently, the set of courses has been submitted to the full faculty for approval, Bertazzoni said.
The full faculty will vote on the curriculum on March 22. If the full faculty approves, the program will be sent to the MHEC.
The MHEC is obligated to notify other institutions that Hood proposed the major and must wait for comments from other schools, Bertazzoni said. “Our hope is that at least no later than sometime next fall, the major will be officially approved and ready so students can declare it,” she said.
Student interest has contributed to the development of the major. “It is a major that they have requested often over the years, and in increasing numbers over the last several years,” Van Winter said. Some students have expressed such an interest in integrated marketing that they have created their own major, he said.
Senior, Ian Patrick, is a communications arts major at Hood. If the IMC major had been a choice for him he would have been interested, he said.
Approaching graduation, Patrick does not feel that he is fully prepared for the marketing research piece of a prospective job, he said. The IMC major would have been beneficial to him for the exposure to those types of classes. Patrick said, “Public relations and marketing go hand in hand.”