After completing my Global Economic and Public Policy final exam last Friday, I officially accomplished my first term in the second year.

It was an intense yet enjoyable 7 weeks. After becoming a second year, I had more freedoms to choose elective courses to satisfy my personal interest. Smith School of Business provides abundant resources and a wide variety of interesting subjects for students. As a marketing focused student, aside from the core course, I chose two additional marketing courses, BUMK 706 Marketing Analysis and BUMK 717 Integrated Marketing Communication.

These two courses enables me to tackle marketing concepts in two drastic manners. Take Marketing Analysis for instance, in this course, students are required to run SAS and GLIMMIX to simplify quantitative problems and develop recommendations for managerial level positions. The course materials are designed by Marketing professors in the Marketing departments. He asserted that the materials we learn in the class are ahead of the industry for 3 to 6 months. I google the similar subjects and found his words to be correct. This course helped me to build my analytical skills.

On the contrary, Integrated Marketing Communication is more qualitative. My classmates and I spent much time discussing about cases, advertisements, and social media. I realize that with the emergence of big data, the importance of ‘Art of Marketing’ is decreasing, yet I found it fascinating to study social media because the effectiveness of different social media channels is still difficult to measure but still plays a significant role in the marketing mix for corporations. We even had the marketing director of Human Rights Campaign to conduct a speech. This course got me inspired and allow me to immerse in different social media channels. I learned a lot from this course.

The final presentation was to develop an IMC campaign for Burger King. Our team came up with the idea of “Start The Day Like A King” to emphasize BK’s brand personality and make it more relevant to its target customers. We did primarily and secondary research, as well as in-store observational researches. We ask our classmate to be model for our campaign and the final work was better than I expected…