Hochschule der Medien
In the summer semester of 2019, I did an exchange semester at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, following the minor Journalism & Communication Management.
During this semester, I joined an international team of 5 students in total, with which I worked on several projects. Since I didn't have a lot of experience with journalism, it was very interesting to learn more about this. At HdM, I had the opportunity to deepen my knowledge of content writing and management. The minor was completely in English, created for international students and local students.
During the first project, we got to develop a social media campaign to make children between the age of 13 and 19 aware of antisemitism and why it is such an important issue that still affects a lot of people in a negative way. After doing a lot of research on the topic, we decided to create an Instagram channel that focussed on the positive framing of Jewish people. Our goal was to show what life is really like for Jewish people. To show their traditions and the fact that they aren't that different from the rest of us. We did this by using fun facts, small challenges, and hashtags, with which we hoped to create a better understanding and also explain in a fun and easy way why anti-semitism is something that should be stopped. Our client, the Israeli embassy, was very happy with our idea and with our approach.
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For another course, called International Content Production, we had to create a multimedia article about a certain subject, in our case it had to do with urban education. For this project, we chose the subject of students using smart drugs, such as Ritalin, to be able to keep up with their studies. For this, we interviewed multiple students who used smart drugs and how they experience it and we talked to one student who had major struggles with study pressure in the past, which ended with burnout, but who consciously decided against using smart drugs. We used these audio files together with matching images and created a podcast. As some of the people who were interviewed want to stay anonymous, I'm not allowed to present this podcast on this website.
Our final, and probably biggest, project was for a class called Innovation Management. For this class, we had to create an innovative product about, in our case, urban education. The project had to be about an international problem that many cities struggle with or will struggle with in the future. The problem we focussed on, was the fact that many parents think that the ways to school are too unsafe for their children. Therefore, they bring their children by car, which makes it less safe for other children.
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As a goal, we wanted to inform the parents of the dangers of bringing their children to school by car and the benefits of walking or biking with them to school. On the other hand, we wanted to motivate the children that walking and biking to school is way better and cooler because once the kids are motivated, they can easily convince their parents as well.
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To reach this goal, we created a magazine for children and parents, which can be distributed at primary school for free to all the children. With this, just like with all the other projects, I was responsible for the design and visuals. The final result of our magazine is visible on the left.
With the little games, we want to attract the children.
With this QR-scancode, the parents can find out what's the safest way for their children to go to school.