What is Applied Humanism?
Our students come from diverse professional and educational backgrounds: many of the graduate students are returning to school after an extended stay in one of the media industries. Their professional experiences have left them hungry to know more about how media operate; they come to CMS in search of a big picture understanding of the contemporary moment of media change. We see this program as helping prepare them for the next phase of their careers – some of them will become media scholars, many more will enter some other media-related profession.
Business leaders, consultants and media designers need up-to-date intellectual tools to think critically about media and their potential for circulating information and dispersing intellectual capital. Government leaders must reach informed decisions about policy and regulation that will affect changing media environments. Journalists must better understand how they can transmit information across a variety of media. Academics need to broaden their understanding of our changing cultural and social environment, recognizing the impact that media systems will have on the way we live, learn, and interact.
CMS is not a production-focused program and it is not a trade school. Yet, we feel that the training it offers is uniquely valuable to people entering a range of media-related occupations. CMS helps students to become leaders who shape and enhance our understanding of media, drawing on their background in the humanities and the social sciences to tackle compelling real-world problems. The CMS curriculum helps students build upon their prior technical and professional knowledge to develop new conceptual models and new forms of expertise and to expand their brainstorming, problem-solving, negotiation, team work, leadership, project completion, and communication skills. They are taught to translate conceptual frameworks into a language which will allow their broad dissemination and application. They are asked to test what they read in their assigned texts against contemporary developments which may change the media landscape. They interact with the best contemporary thinkers about media, whether they are scholars, journalists, business and government leaders, artists, activists, journalists, or policy makers. They become important participants in ongoing research initiatives in areas such as educational games, media literacy, or branded entertainment, which directly apply what they are learning in their classes to respond to specific challenges confronting education and industry.