Pros and Cons of Northwestern's Integrated Marketing Communications (Northwestern IMC) Program, and Where Graduates End Up

Hi everyone 👋🏼 I'm kristine

Application season is here again. In my last post, looking back more than five years after finishing grad school, I shared five small tips on making the most of your time in grad school. Today I want to share the pros and cons of the master's program I graduated from, Northwestern's integrated marketing degree (Northwestern University Masters of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications)

I graduated from Northwestern's Integrated Marketing Communications master's program five years ago, and I now work as a brand strategy consultant at a brand consultancy in New York. There's plenty out there from current Northwestern IMC students and interviewees, but very little from alumni who graduated a few years ago, so I hope this is useful to you! If you have any questions, leave me a comment 🫡 In this post I mainly cover Northwestern IMC's: 💡three things I liked 💡three things I didn't like 💡career prospects five years after graduating I also talk about these points in a slightly different format in a YouTube video. If you're interested, check it out on my YouTube channel:

https://youtu.be/SnoV4sVoqDE

❤️What I liked - room to explore

Every master's program opens a second door to your new future, and Northwestern IMC is no exception. The second door Northwestern's IMC master's opens for you is wide, because the program lets you explore all kinds of possibilities in marketing and related fields. The program currently offers 4 specializations, streamlined from the 6 tracks it had when I was in it in 2017. Because there are so many courses to choose from and so many directions to pursue, during the master's you can explore different subfields of marketing and broaden your knowledge across areas. If students choose to focus on a particular sequence, they can dig deep into different fields. According to the Northwestern IMC program website, the current specializations are:

▶️Consumer insight and analytics

▶️Brand strategy (my focus back then)

▶️Strategic communications

▶️Media

Students get to explore the breadth of marketing while building solid skills and knowledge in one specific specialization. That turns graduates into the T-shaped talent companies value so highly today. Everyone comes into the program as a highly adaptable student and leaves as sought-after T-shaped talent.

❤️What I liked - the classmates

When I was in the program, my class had about 130 students. Every one of those 130-plus people was really smart, capable and interesting. Everyone came from very different backgrounds, so by talking and working with your peers you get all kinds of perspectives. That's usually hard to come by once you're working.

Employers all say they champion diverse hiring. In reality, most of the time they don't follow through, and diversity inside companies is limited. Personally, I think Northwestern IMC students come from really diverse backgrounds. There may be a lot of people from the Asia-Pacific region, but even so, their backgrounds are very different. And because the program is big enough, you get to interact with different people across your classes. Through coursework and class discussions you learn from these peers: how they work, how they think, how they solve problems. Those are things you can't learn from textbooks and typical courses.

❤️What I liked - the professors

Last, and I think most important: the professors are industry people. Many of them either still work full-time in their field or moved from industry to academia recently. Because they stay so close to real industry work, the projects they design and the feedback they give are very practical. The projects resemble problems you might run into on the job, though they're less complex because of the limited time and effort students can put into each course. When I applied for jobs after graduating, these projects helped round out my résumé. I could show employers how I'd demonstrated these skills in projects, and I landed the offer I wanted after graduation.

Professors also bring in their colleagues and peers, which gave us a deeper sense of how our coursework applies directly to the “real world.” They also give feedback on our projects alongside the professors, much as they would in their day jobs. We didn't just learn from the professors; we put the theory into practice and got feedback to help us improve our skills.

💔Three things I didn't like - you can't choose your summer Immersion Program

A signature feature of Northwestern's IMC master's is its Immersion Program. It takes place in your third quarter, from June to August. Essentially, it's like a summer internship. Northwestern partners with different companies to run Immersion Program projects with them. Because it's part of the curriculum, besides your boss at the company you also have the support of school faculty. You can consult them and talk things through with them the whole way. You also have to give the school “midterm” and “final” presentations.

It's a group project. My group had four people including me, and we were relocated to Houston for the whole summer. We worked together, lived together and ate together, 24 hours a day for three months. Luckily, one of my best friends was in my group, so sharing a room was no problem. I can't imagine how rough it would have been if I hadn't gotten along with them or if our habits were different.

Now that I've explained what the Immersion Program is, I can talk about why I didn't like it.

Immersion Program projects are assigned through a matching process that pairs students with projects. You can't choose which project you do or who you do it with. Beforehand, every student fills out a questionnaire, the school feeds the answers into an algorithm, and the algorithm outputs which students are in each project group. Students get no say at all.

Personally, I still really liked my project and my teammates. But I didn't like not being able to choose my project. Looking back, even though it was a great experience and I enjoyed it, it didn't quite match my career plans, so it may not have been the choice that best helped me into the next stage of my career.

💔Three things I didn't like - you bid for courses

Course registration each quarter works by bidding, so you won't necessarily get every course you want. As with the Immersion Quarter, the program has so many students that not everyone can get the courses they want; satisfying every student is impossible. So the school designed a course bidding system. For all the courses offered each quarter, every student gets 100 points in total to “bid” on courses. If a course can only take 20 students, the 20 highest bidders get to take it. Allocating your points is very strategic. You may want to put more points on more popular courses so you don't miss out. I suppose it's one of life's lessons that not every wish comes true. But given how much tuition we paid, it's my one small complaint.

Especially since not every course is offered every quarter. So you might miss a course you really wanted in the bidding, and it may not be offered again in the quarters before you graduate. If you really want it, though, you can still audit the course without getting credit. Professors usually allow it, so that's one workaround.

💔Three things I didn't like - the weather

The last one isn't really a complaint about the program but about where Northwestern is. Northwestern is in the Chicago suburbs, in the US Midwest, in a town called Evanston, and the winters are brutally cold. Winter lasts up to six months, and lows can hit minus forty-something degrees Celsius. It starts getting cold around November each year and warms up around April. And in winter the days are very short; it can be dark by three or four in the afternoon.

So during your time there, you'll spend many months in Evanston's cold, snowy, dark winter. You'll find out firsthand that seasonal depression is real. There's no avoiding it. Those of us who grew up in Taiwan all got a big culture shock, and we learned our own way of “when in Rome”: taking enough vitamin D.

💡Career prospects after graduation

Of course, a big reason to do a master's is your career afterward! To look at career outcomes for Northwestern IMC, I researched where my classmates are five years after graduating. As I mentioned, the program draws talent from all over the world and people build different skills, so the career paths they chose are very broad, including but not limited to:

▶️Market research and consumer insights

▶️Entrepreneurship

▶️Brand strategy

▶️Media strategy

▶️Content marketing strategy

▶️Marketing strategy

▶️Digital marketing strategy

▶️Growth strategy

▶️Business management and strategy

▶️Product management

▶️Product marketing

▶️Brand management

▶️Brand marketing

▶️Data science

▶️Management consulting

▶️Data analytics

▶️Business intelligence

▶️Digital transformation

▶️Operations management

Because people came in with different levels of experience, they're now at different levels too. From what I've seen, many are at the “senior” level, and some are directors or even vice presidents.

My conclusion is that what makes this program valuable is that it can lead you down many career paths and lets you meet lots of different people and grow your network. It's a good way to find your place in the broad field of marketing. It has strengths and weaknesses, like anything in life. It just comes down to whether it's the right fit for where you are in life right now.

If you have other thoughts or questions, let me know. If you liked this post, come say hi on my YouTube or Instagram!

HTTPS://www.instagram.com/krisliuliu

HTTPS://www.YouTube.com/@krisliuliu