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A Week of Immersion, A Lifetime of Inspiration

At several points in the year, Medill's Integrated Marketing Communications Professional program offers elective immersive courses. Each one provides the chance to take a course in person for one week and earn a full credit toward your degree. Courses are held in a variety of cities and give you the opportunity to build in-person connections with your faculty and classmates. This can enrich courses taken remotely and on campus with an entirely unique experience. Each immersive course brings you closer to realizing your professional aspirations.

Choose courses that align with your interests and ambitions. Gain powerful global perspectives and enrich your professional network. Focus intensely on one area of development while completing a full credit of your graduate program in a single week.

Meet your classmates in person.

Learn directly from industry leaders.

Focus deeply on a chosen area.

The Advantage of Medill's IMC Immersive Marketing Courses

Commit a week to your studies, distraction-free.

Medill’s IMC immersive courses provide a unique combination of advantages: experiential learning that provides you with real-world experience and an understanding of current challenges in marketing; creative problem-solving strategies that will serve you throughout your career; direct access to industry leaders; networking opportunities with other students and alumni; and the flexibility to finish your studies and achieve your career goals. A week spent deeply entrenched with Medill faculty and your own talented classmates can give you a lifetime of inspiration.

Course Details

Each week-long elective course fulfills one credit of the program’s 13 units
Course topics are designed to take unique advantage of the city in which each course is offered. Domestic courses are offered at Medill locations in Chicago, New York and San Francisco; global immersive courses are held in London and Asia
All courses are taught entirely in person
You’ll be eligible to take immersive courses after you complete the program’s first three core courses
Immersive courses are optional and not required for completion of the program

Medill’s priority is always the health and safety of our students. We may make adjustments to planned course locations based on guidance from Northwestern’s Office of Global Safety and Security.

Recent Medill IMC Professional Immersive Marketing Courses

Introduction to Marketing Technology

Taught in March
New York City

2024 instructor:
Jonathan Copulsky
Senior Lecturer
Former CMO of Deloitte Consulting

Marketers have access to hundreds of vendors offering diverse technology applications such as campaign management, marketing resource management, marketing analytics and content marketing. Introduction to Marketing Technology introduces you to the opportunities and challenges of using these marketing technologies.

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Design Thinking

Taught in December
San Francisco

2024 instructor:
Tran Ha
Founder and Principal at Tiny Collaborative
Former Managing Director of Media Experiments at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

Today’s most innovative products, services and technologies identify latent needs and ways to solve them, and continuously iterate and improve. Design Thinking provides tools to help you design with your customers, not for them, and in doing so, develop strategies to drive innovation and mitigate marketing risk.

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Digital Leadership

Taught in September
Chicago

2024 instructors:
Randy Hlavac
Medill Lecturer
Director of the Medill IMC / IBM OmniChannel Initiative
CEO of Marketing Synergy, Inc.

Erik Qualman
Founder of Socialnomics
Bestselling Author and Motivational Speaker

Digital leaders are made, not born. Learn how to step fully into leadership in this digital decade. Begin to future-proof yourself and your organization by staying a year ahead of your competition, but never a year ahead of your market.

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Circular Economy: Business Sustainability

Taught in June
San Francisco

2024 instructor:
Preeti Shroff-Mehta
Professor and Director of IMC Executive Programs

The Circular Economy and Sustainability course will introduce students to practical ways of incorporating sustainable practices across the entire business value chain.

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Integrating Sustainability in Brand Management

Taught in December
Santiago, Chile

2024 instructor:
Vijay Viswanathan
Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani
Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications and Associate Dean of IMC

This course will begin by examining the role of branding in building a business's reputation and relationship with its stakeholders. Students will learn how a brand strategy aligns with the company's mission and values while also considering the social and environmental impact of the brand.

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Global Perspectives—London

Taught in June
London, UK

2023 instructor:
Candy Lee
Medill Professor of Marketing and
of Journalism
Former VP of Marketing at The Washington Post

In this course, you’ll learn about global marketing, the financial hub that is London, organizational behavior and the skills needed to lead brands in the new digital and creative economy that is international and multicultural within one border.

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Been There, Loved That: Firsthand Experience with Medill's Immersive Courses

Lindsay B., IMC ’22

“You're learning a lot, you're moving quickly through the material because of the truncated time, but you're also building extraordinary and robust connections with the professors and your classmates. The two courses I've done had extraordinary guest speakers who really bring the learnings to life. You're meeting those guests, who are practitioners, and getting to network. The sessions are also often combined with social learning events: mixers or panel discussions that take place after hours, so you're getting a condensed, valuable experience. And in the practicality of moving through the program, you're also building a whole credit in the course of a week.”

Christopher I., IMC ’22

“It’s an experience I’ll never forget. The first day was to practice interviewing random people in public and try to understand them at a deep level in a very short time. It was amazing how much you could learn by being open and asking the right questions. The next day, it was meeting with the client and interviewing a few people in our target. Then we took those insights and worked toward finding insights instead of finite solutions. That was probably the most difficult thing to do—we’re so hardwired to find a solution that we pass up the possibilities that may not yet exist. By the end of the week, we had jotted down thousands of insights on boards, on walls, and filtered them through new constraints and possibilities until we made a breakthrough discovery. It was a master class in a systematic approach to harnessing the power of imagination.”

Keep Asking Questions

Are immersive courses required for degree completion?

No. Immersive courses are not required for completion of the IMC Professional master’s program. Each one is an option that students may choose to pursue.

Do immersive courses carry the same credit value as the other courses in the program?

Yes. Each one counts as an elective and can help shorten the amount of time it takes to complete the program.

What costs are associated with the IMC immersive courses?

Tuition for these courses is the same as any other courses in the program; there are no additional fees. Students are responsible for their own travel costs (flights, accommodations) if needed.

How are immersive courses different from the other elective course offerings?

They are offered in person, during breaks between regular academic quarters
Each one is about a week long and provides a more concentrated, intensive experience than the standard courses, each of which requires a full academic quarter for completion
They provide further opportunities for in-person course experiences; students can meet with peers, faculty members, and students in other cohorts, and gain the benefits of hands-on learning

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Are you a working professional looking to take your career to the next level?

Earn your master’s degree online, in-person or a combination with Northwestern University. Our Integrated Marketing Communications Professional program, offered through the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications helps you build your expertise in consumer understanding through a rigorous and immersive curriculum.

Complete the form to download a program brochure for more information on the IMC Professional program.

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