Student Perspectives on Experiential Learning and the New Digital Marketing & Commerce Course

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Our new Digital Marketing and Commerce course, developed in partnership with Target, SapientNitro, IBM and Millward Brown, brings the real world to the classroom. Hear what a few of our faculty and senior practitioners had to say in the video above, and read on for more thoughts from our students below.

I spent a summer at Amazon working as an intern on the app store team, and I’m happy to report that I’ll be going back full-time as a product manager. When I read through the course description for Digital Marketing and Commerce, it almost read like my job description for my full-time role. I think the connection between the course and what I will actually be doing in my full-time job is absolutely clear to me: the ability to pull together a cross-functional team, to deliver a store within a short span of time, to really understand that, a lot of times, it’s not just strategy, but operational issues that can really tie you up at the end of the process. That was a huge lesson for me.

—Jayadev Vadakkanmarveettil ’13

I see this course as being extremely helpful to me in my post-Kellogg career, particularly as marketer. Companies new and old are trying to crack this omni-channel code, and digital commerce is an area where few people have real world experience and expertise, so I’m thankful to be able to speak to my learnings from this class. Companies are looking for fresh perspectives, young minds and newly minted MBAs, and this is an area where we can really make an impact right away in our careers.

—Allison Wyrwicz ’13

I think the way that this class really helped me prepare for a career in e-commerce is by giving me a really good sense of what, not only developing a strategy looks like, but actually executing it. Throughout the class, I was able to go and really think about an idea and how to deliver value, while also looking at the different technology components to make it come alive.

—Ricardo Gonzalez Rugamas ’14

I can’t tell you how much I appreciated having the senior practitioners as a part of our class. It was unbelievable to have industry professionals, such as the president of e-commerce at Walgreens and the head of e-commerce for Office Max, come speak to us about their experiences in this space and the issues that they face on a day-to-day basis. The great thing about it is that this is still such a new and developing area that they don’t actually have all the answers. Nobody does — and that’s what so exciting about it.

—Gabrielle Berger ’13