The Emerging Media Degree Program prepares students to understand, develop, and lead the social, political and economic role of technology in society. The confluence of the principle areas of the program incubate an intellectual balance of form and function, design and build, art and science; creating a milieu in which our students can explore emerging opportunities. The program combines content in media analysis, design, and production with computation-based content. As such, Emerging Media is truly interdisciplinary, with clear intersections between all the degrees in the Park School as well as many programs across Ithaca College in every school. The interdisciplinary curriculum offers students the opportunity to develop an array of skills, competencies, and conceptual foundations that can be applied to a myriad of industry and intellectual areas.
Emerging Media (B.S.)
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In addition to the foundational core courses, all emerging media students have a flexible and adaptive elective requirement, where they select 18 credits of coursework relevant to their interests and in close discussion with an academic advisor. Since Emerging Media brings together a wide variety of student interests and applicable media industries, it is crucial that each student is able to create the academic plan that will lead them to their chosen post-graduate goals. Students can have elective courses count for the elective requirement from all departments in Park, as well as from programs across campus such as Computer Science, Graphic Design, social sciences, and many more. Together with their academic advisor, each student develops an academic plan so that the electives chosen are intentional and sequential.
The flexible curriculum accommodates student interest by allowing each student to select from a variety of electives, but also by adapting to each student’s career interests as expressed by the project choice in the “Junior Project” and “Senior Capstone” classes. Additionally, the Project/Capstone experience is an innovative two-year transition from academic-style work to a more professional industry-style project based work. By acclimating the students to long arcing project based assignments, including product/project management and research, they are better prepared to enter both professional and research-based settings. The mission of this program is to engage and support students to become ethical leaders within the evolving discipline of emerging media, whether as designers and creators of media and technology, or as entrepreneurs creating media products. New media are inherently interdisciplinary, integrating artistic creativity with computational expertise, so the Emerging Media program takes an integrative approach to the education of our graduates, while still maintaining a strong disciplinary focus.
As a graduate of the program—whether you want to be a designer or creator of media and technology or an entrepreneur starting a new media business—you’ll know how to identify market opportunities, conceptualize products, and employ storytelling structures. You’ll have a proficiency in using software tools, and you’ll know how to deploy data driven decision making and promote the kinds of organizational and cultural changes that make new media innovations successful and responsible. Most importantly, you’ll have a skill set to work in existing media and the capability to imagine—and even introduce to the world—what might come next.