Credits - Internship and Courses

Credits - Internship and Courses

FALL AND SPRING TERMS, students earn a combined 15 total credits for their internship (6 credits) and course credits (9 credits). You will receive credits for the following courses in both Fall and Spring terms, which are designed to help boost your professional career.

The courses you’ll take as a CMDI in D.C. will help you bring a critical thinking perspective to the challenges you’ll face during your internship. Class sizes are kept small by design to facilitate relationships, allow for shared experiences from internship and academic work, and encourage lively discussions with invited guests and instructors. The courses include active learning and at times include experiential learning (i.e. field trips in D.C.).

Students gain the necessary knowledge and expertise to navigate a changing landscape and produce professional-quality content in various media, including print, video, audio and digital platforms. A key objective is empowering students to be adaptable and nimble in the face of rapidly changing technologies, keeping in mind the short lifespan of some tools and the need to continuously upgrade their skills to stay relevant.

Everything about today’s media and the forces shaping it has a political implication—from coverage of politics, to the tilt of that coverage and the business model for funding media. But more fundamentally, the foundational role media plays in ensuring the democratic nature of our society makes the evolution of media today political by its very nature: who controls it, how it is funded, its strained efforts at objectivity. This course explores that evolution from a nonpartisan perspective, answering questions about what the media is, what shapes it, what role it plays in our democracy and where it’s going.

No matter what field you go into, you need to understand the business foundations of any industry. Success is not just about having skills, it’s about knowing how to take an idea from the back of a napkin or a note on your phone and do something with it. That “something” is at the heart of entrepreneurship. This class will teach you how to start and build your own business, from concept to execution. It dives into the big ideas of business and the process of developing a product or service. By the end of class, students know how to put an idea through the wringer, rapidly prototype, pivot, refine and execute at a high level.

SUMMER TERM, students earn 9 total credits. They include six for their internship and three for course credits, which is CMDI 3000 Special Topics: Media Skills for Professionals. Like Fall and Spring, the course includes active learning and engagement in D.C.

These courses generally fulfill upper-division elective course requirements. In addition, the internship credits you’ll earn in Washington typically fulfill the requirement for majors needing one in order to graduate.

For questions about how the coursework fulfills your degree requirements, contact your academic advisor.

Photo of Michael

I anticipated an internship where I would sit at a desk for hours, and that’s not at all what it’s been. I feel I'm doing work that's interesting and useful for people in different sectors.”
Michael Bass (ٰٰdz’24)
Intern, The Hill

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You will need:

  • A current résumé.

  • Your unofficial CU transcript.

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