Our Amazing Clients

Clemson Area African American Museum

William Cunningham’s business writing courses worked with the Clemson African American Museum through the CBP. This program has allowed Cunningham’s students to write a South Carolina Humanities Mini Grant for the museum. Two of his spring classes continued this project. His third business writing class for the spring worked with Dr. Rhondda Thomas and her project entitled ‘Call My Name.’ This class worked to write a South Carolina Humanities Major Grant for her project.

Clemson Emeritus College

Megan Lee Pietruszewski’s business writing classes partnered with the Clemson Emeritus College, which houses 748 retired faculty members and serves to help faculty stay engaged during retirement. In the fall, students helped gauge faculty interest in future events, developed a marketing plan for the college with recommendations of future events, campaigns, logos and student organization partnerships, as well as conducted a content evaluation with recommendations for weekly newsletters, blog posts and website content.

The Tiger & The Writing In the Disciplines Channel

Mike Pully’s Writing for News Media Class includes one section of 18 students who complete feature stories, news trend articles and data stories for The Tiger, Clemson’s student newspaper. Additionally, he teaches three sections of Science Writing and Communication, including 62 students, who work with the WID Channel. Students work in teams to complete instructional guides on how to complete common documents in the STEM fields for the WID Channel Website.

CU 1000 General Education Modules

Clemson University has recognized the need to update its CU1000 module to include more detailed information about the new general education curriculum being implemented called Crossings. As it currently stands, the student body is largely unaware of both the new Crossings curriculum and the benefits of general education. Ashley Fisk’s business writing class’s second project with Bridget Trogden in Spring 2022 was to better understand what should be included in the Crossings module.
With a focus on gauging student opinion on Clemson’s general education courses, the class conducted research through a survey given to the current CU1000 students. These questions focused on students’ opinions towards the existing module and their thoughts on the necessity of general education.

Once the class received and analyzed the responses, they used that information to decide the best content to include in the module and how to effectively convey the information to engage students. The analytical report and oral presentation focused on current student engagement and understanding of general education, which will assist in creating a functional module.

The benefits of this data and module aim to assist Trogden in enhancing student interest and understanding of the importance of Crossings classes to their undergraduate education
at Clemson.

Marketing Academic Initiatives
To Generation Z

Bridget Trogden, the associate dean for engagement and general education, division of undergraduate studies, partnered with Ashley Fisk’s business writing class on two projects. The first was to improve the Clemson students’ awareness of academic initiatives.
Because students are generally unaware of initiatives put in place by the University, individual colleges and departments, the class was tasked to create a marketing plan that would market these initiatives to undergraduate students. In order to target this market effectively, they utilized research concerning Generation Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) to determine the most efficient methods to gain their attention and engagement.

The class conducted primary and secondary research. Primary research was gathered through a questionnaire created on Qualtrics; this platform was also utilized to analyze the data collected and generate a report for Trogden. The students presented their final analysis of how to create more interest in Clemson academic initiatives through a recommendation report and oral presentation in front of peers. This information will assist Trogden’s team in exploring, evaluating and implementing new methods to attract students’ attention to these academic initiatives.

National Survey of
Student Engagement Analysis

Ashley Fisk’s business writing class worked with Rene Schmauder, the director of undergraduate assessment. Schmauder had identified a disparity in communication and engagement between University leadership and students related to curriculum development and wanted to enlist the class’s help solving this problem.

Schmauder tasked the class with examining Clemson’s National Survey of Student Engagement results from 2016 and 2021 and then providing feedback in the form of a recommendation report. The feedback provided will allow the Office of Assessment of Undergraduate Studies to better utilize the survey results in the future. The class was divided into five groups with the 40 survey questions assigned
among them.

As a whole, the class identified patterns that they found interesting in each section of questions, such as demographic patterns and the continuity between questions in 2016 versus 2021. The purpose of this information, according to Schmauder, was to increase student involvement with the University’s decision-making processes. The feedback that the class provided will make the results more statistically significant and impactful.