What should you ask before returning or entering graduate school?

Questions to ask (some are very sensitive but ask them anyway)
1. placement record and time to secure a job after graduation
2. scholarships or loans (not available for international students)- this will become a serious issue
3. percent of international and U.S. students (too many too few to learn from and what countries).
4. quality of placement (some call it the euphemistic "career planning") to get you a job with the companies and organizations supporting the school.
5. names of contacts of former graduates to hear the good and bad (not a short list of admission department names)
6. what has happened to the international students? Are they working in the U.S., is it even possible, does the school know where they are if they returned to their country.
7. is the program in professional education dominated by recent graduates with little or no work experience. Does this matter to you?
8. is the program a balance of men and women? Does it matter to you?
9. are they too many part-time faculty teaching in the evening (not available for meetings). Should classes be co-taught to get a mix of new research and thinking from doctoral faculty and new experience and contacts from industry faculty?
10. Is a part-time degree the best choice financially and personally to keep your hand in business? Is the return on investment (ROI) stronger?

PR and Marketing Communications

Richard Edelman and his brother John produced with PRWeek a hit on the role of newer media www.edelman.com/summit07. The first annual conference was balanced between bloggers-journalists and journalist-bloggers plus PR professionals. The program included a few academics on the panels offering cogent definitions (one of the roles of professors). In this gathering "those who do" vs. "those who teach"seemed to have more to contribute. It may be that the professors on the panels and those in the audience with some encouragement from the Web 2.0 industry may have more substantive research to contribute next year. A number of the professionals had "experiments" (their term for smaller tests of new ideas and processes), but the experiments did not necessarily follow the discipline of social science to give listeners confidence in the observations.

At the Medill School of Journalism and Integrated Marketing Communications www.medill.northwestern.edu (Northwestern University), a class with our graduate students produced an open source chapter with their professor and Anders Gronstedt Group www.gronstedtgroup.com on viral marketing and communications. The students smartly attached a number of examples including blogs, podcasts, Second City events and Youtube efforts to illustrate their ideas.

Links for selected IMC Communications Class projects:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSM7GnXyULo x

http://cboimc.blogspot.com/

http://www.subtlesell.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGb_yr8XXa4

http://assign-me.blogspot.com/

Your thoughts? More to come to link to the open source chapter.

More to come.