There’s a lot going on in Franklin Hall this fall! It’s only October, and we’ve already hosted 200+ high school students for an Ohio Scholastic Media Association (OSMA) regional workshop, a Digital Media Production (DMP) open house, a Student Media Board meeting, multiple Student Media open houses, several Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) events, a faculty retreat, daily TV2 news broadcasts and more. And we’re just getting started!
We also wrapped up a visit with ACEJMC accreditors this month and showcased the great work we’ve done over the last couple of years. We’ve included an updated MDJ assessment report in the materials shared with ACEJMC in advance of the visit. The assessment document maps our curriculum to program learning outcomes and to ACEJMC values and competencies. It shares feedback from media professionals who evaluated samples of our student work. It also reports on student experiences in internships, from both student and supervisor perspectives.
Our assessment report also includes initial findings from the alumni survey we circulated earlier this year. We received more than 200 responses from alumni who earned an undergraduate degree from the School of Media and Journalism (formerly known as the School of Journalism and Mass Communication). Thank you to all Jargon readers who participated!
More than half of the survey’s respondents (52%) indicated they feel at least somewhat connected to the School. Certainly, there is an element of self-selection to any alumni survey, with those who choose to respond perhaps already being predisposed to feeling connected, but this number is gratifying as we continue to work to build and deepen connections among our talented alumni and students.
While alumni from as far back as the graduating class of 1950 participated in this survey, more than half of responses came from undergraduate alumni who’ve graduated since 2017. 87% of these respondents reported being satisfied with their experience here, but a subsequent question asking, “How well did MDJ prepare you for working in a professional field related to your field of study?” yielded somewhat less enthusiastic results, with 71% saying they felt “very” or “extremely” well prepared for professional work in a field related to their degree.
These are still great numbers, but as we dug into it, we saw that we need to do a better job of letting students know about existing opportunities across the College of Communication and Information (CCI) particularly in coding, user experience, data analysis and audio production — all areas in which respondents felt they would have benefited from more instruction. In nearly every one of the 17 categories we invited alumni to evaluate, the majority of respondents reported they would have liked at least some additional training. The exceptions to this were writing, copy editing, public speaking, media ethics and media law. But never fear! Our commitment to these last five topics isn’t going anywhere. That’s foundational knowledge, and survey results suggest we’re doing a good job integrating that content into all we do. That’s not going to change.
A final note about the survey: We invited respondents to share three adjectives they would use to describe MDJ and their experience at the School. The image below is a word cloud generated from alumni who have graduated since 2017. We know that serving students and ensuring everyone’s success is always a work in progress, but we’re pleased to see the overall positive tone of evaluations we receive from alumni – especially the ones who have most recently passed through our doors. Thank you again to all alumni who responded to this survey.
