Students prepare for careers in advertising agencies, publications, the broadcast media, broadcasting stations, business and industry, and trade and professional associations. Advertising majors choose between two areas of emphasis: the Advertising Account /Management Track to develop expertise in planning, budgeting, administrating and coordinating services; and the Advertising/Creative Track to master the creative components of the advertising industry, including writing, design, print and broadcast production, traffic and creative services. Non-majors may choose advertising as a minor, which requires the completion of 21 credit hours that may include both management and creative advertising courses. Both tracks, account management and creative, are available as minors. [Click for more!]

Students select one of two sequences: Broadcast News or Radio-Television. Coursework in the Electronic Media sequences during the first two years is similar. Specialization occurs during the last two years. All electronic media students learn basic and more advanced techniques and disciplines of pre-production, studio and field production, and post-production, especially digital tape editing. [Click for more!]

The magazine major prepares students to be magazine writers, editors, designers and creative directors.  As part of their coursework, students:
•write magazine articles for consumer, trade and organization magazines;
•work as staff members for the nationally award-winning 515 Magazine and other titles and Web sites published through the E.T. Meredith Center for Magazine Studies ;
• produce a business plan and design for a magazine of their own.
In recent years, students have also produced magazines for the Annie E. Casey Foundation on the Making Connections initiative in Des Moines and on the issue of Prisoner Re-Entry in Iowa. [Click for more!]

As News/Internet majors, students gain knowledge and skills needed for careers in reporting, editing, management or publishing, on-line and on paper. Graduates work on newspaper staffs, in the news departments of other news media and agencies, in public information positions and in Web site editing positions. [Click for more!]

Public relations professionals work to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between an organization/client and its many different publics. They work in many different settings including a variety of settings-corporate, small business, government, and political campaigns, non-profit organizations agencies and PR counseling firms. Public relations professionals have a wide The range of opportunities including for qualified PR professionals is one of the broadest: media relations, special events, fund raising, speech writing, employee relations, investor relations, corporate communications and counseling, strategic planning and crisis communication. management on policies and programs. Students exercise the research, planning and communication skills they are learning developing as they work with “real world” clients in each of their PR classes. [Click for more!]

In the 3+3 program, a student is scheduled to complete all Journalism and Mass Communication course requirements in the first three years at Drake, including the classes for a specific undergraduate JMC major. If admitted to the Law School, the student then counts the Law School courses taken in the fourth year as constituting the area of concentration required of all SJMC majors. The fourth year also constitutes the student's first year of enrollment in Law School. [Click for more!]