The Drake School of Journalism and Mass Communication is made up of more than 300 undergraduate students, all with different goals and aspirations for their time as a Bulldog. For numerous students, though, the school only offers some of the classes that directly correlate with their desired career path , leaving room for new programs and classes to blossom.
With people from all walks of life studying in the SJMC, classes are added yearly to help adapt to students’ wants and needs. In 2025, a new course will be making its first appearance: sports publicity and promotions.
“We are so lucky to have a great partnership with our Drake Athletic [Department] colleagues,” Dean Kelly Bruhn said about the decision to add the new course. “We have quite a few students that work with them while studying in different branches. Knowing we had a growing group of incoming students who are interested in sports, we wanted to learn how we can help add that for those students.”
The creator of this course, assistant professor of public relations Mu He, will be rolling out the class as soon as possible, with its potential debut coming in the spring of 2025. This course will combine experience that He has in researching sports communications with his prior experience teaching the course at the University of Miami, Florida.
“I made this course from scratch when I was a fourth-year doctoral student at the University of Miami,” He said. “Since my community members and department chair knew about my passion for sports, we started working on a course called sports publicity and promotions, which hadn’t been taught in a couple of years because the person that used to teach a version of the class left the department and nobody wanted to pick it up.”
The course at Drake will examine entry-level aspects of covering sports and sports promotion. The course will take a PR focus on different sports and how to work with teams from the collegiate to the professional level. Some of the topics that students can look forward to include how to work one-on-one with athletes, crisis management and campaigning.
“I want this course to open the door for students who are interested in sports or sports communications, like PR, so they know all of the different perspectives and can dive into the world of sports,” He said.
