Alumni Spotlight: Tim Marshall '11

“The top things that I learned from the IMC program here at Eastern Michigan were to be a better manager, you have to have an understanding of the big picture. A lot of us in this industry focus on our one tactic or PR people or marketing people or sales people, but to be successful it all goes back to that big picture."-Tim Marshall '11

Tim Marshall '11

I chose Eastern for the MS IMC program for two reasons: 1) It is accredited. That is very important for me, for my employer at the time, for all of my future employers, and it is important to have that backing. 2) The faculty are great. We have faculty who have worked with major brands, worked for multi-national corporations, and those who worked with small businesses. We have faculty in the PR department, in business, in marketing, and advertising.

"It is very important that we, as EMU alumni, network with each other but also within the IMC program. And that is actually a great benefit of taking the MS IMC program: your cohort is going to be made up of people from all over the country. [When you do a group project] I was working in the Eastern time zone and my partner on the project was from California with a different time zone, so we would have conference calls at midnight my time. But, it allowed me to build a professional network across the country and I would not get that in a different type of program. At the same time, I think it is important that those of us who came out of the IMC program network with other EMU alumni to talk about our program and to continue to grow that professional network.

The best advice I would give to someone entering the IMC program at EMU is to jump outside your comfort zone. The whole reason we are in this program is to have a broad understanding of what goes into a successful IMC strategy and you cannot do that if you stick to what you know.

The EMU IMC program is great and I would encourage anybody to investigate it as an option to advance their career. I would give people the advice of pacing themselves and I would let people know that you might have a different career goal in mind when you finish the program than when you started. That is sort of the benefit of the program too. You might have a career plan at the beginning, but when you are done you might see yourself as a whole new marketing professional.”