The title of my program is Creative Marketing for Health and Wellness. The competencies are grounded in the National Wellness Institute model for academic program accreditation. Using this model, I’ve broken my degree into business skills, applied Health and Wellness skills, and applied technical skills. I’ve chosen to take courses in the areas that motivate me from the disciplines of Business, Communication, Graphic Design and Health and Wellness that will best help me with my career. My degree can be thought of as a triangle; the bottom of the triangle is technical skills and business skills. I will apply these skills to Health and Wellness principles which are at the top of the triangle.

My passion for Health and Wellness began  in 2015 when I worked for my first nutritionist at a health food store and organic cafe. During the fall of that year, I wrote an article for my boss published in the Laconia Daily Sun about Superfoods. I knew then that I wanted to combine my love for writing and use it to promote a healthy lifestyle. In my career path I first intend on working in Marketing, promoting Health and Wellness. Then, I hope to work my way up to a marketing manager position. After learning more about the industry, I will open my own business. I’ve derived this progression of my career from this idea: you can have the greatest product, but if you don’t know how to promote it, you don’t have anything.

My degree will turn my passions into professional skills that allow me to know my product, promote my business, and use my good transpersonal and publication skills. The program that I’m going to create cannot be made with any other major. I’ve extracted the areas that motivate me – the technical skills in Journalism and Graphic Design are highly creative. The Business courses give me a professional edge, and the Health courses will enhance the existing knowledge I have of my product.

            Through Plymouth State University’s Interdisciplinary Studies program, I had the chance to create a major that revolved around two topics that I feel very passionate about; sustainability and marketing. I decided to name my program marketing for sustainable practices because I plan to gain the skills and knowledge to help companies develop and implement more sustainable practices, and to market these concepts to the public to make more people aware of the environmental issues we are faced with today. The end goal I strive to achieve is to create a healthier environment over the years to help lessen the serious environmental concerns of today. Throughout the course of my program I plan on taking various courses pertaining to environmental science, sustainability, marketing and business. I found that no current PSU program would suffice for what I plan to do in my future career because there were no programs that were completely unique as to what I would like to study. A lot of the programs at PSU that relate to sustainability and marketing are very focused on one subject. While creating my program I evenly distribute my interests, while doing my best to intertwine the two subjects together to create an equal understanding of both topics, and relating them back to one another. I chose not to minor in one subject and major in the other due to the simple fact of the imbalance of knowledge and skills of one subject compared to the other. It would be possible for someone to say I could have double majored in marketing and sustainability, but by the time I realized what I wanted to do for the rest of my life I was already an incoming junior. I had no time to take all the courses to fulfill both majors.

The world is constantly evolving, shaped by the transformation of technological innovations that occur seemingly every day. I think that’s probably why I became fascinated with computers in the first place: I was swept up with the allure of innovation and change. Somehow I could make a difference simply by typing in lines of code into a computer, and an online product could change the way we live our lives. That’s why I went to college for Computer Science. I wanted to make things. The more classes I’ve taken, the more it seems that I’m being trained to learn how to be just what a corporation wants: specialized skills in a specific subfield of the technology industry, excited to apply to large technology firms instructing their employees to develop platforms to add to their amassing suite of tools. The Computer Science department seems to be too focused on preparing me for a job where I sit at a desk coding for 8 hours a day. I, unlike Liam Neeson, do not want to obtain a “very particular set of skills”. Instead, I want to make a difference. Instead of learning how to understand code that will help me find a job maintaining existing software, I want to develop the skills that will help me design platforms to help us use technology to enhance our experience of everyday life in the physical world. I already have some knowledge of coding, but I want more experience with the other aspects of digital transformation. Technology is now on the brink of helping us experience the world and live our lives more fully. That is where technology is evolving. I need to teach myself how to think critically, from not only a technological sense, but also in a social sense, so that way I can prepare myself for the technology jobs that don’t even exist yet. I want to become well rounded in “outside the box” ways of thinking, teaching myself to analyse and problem solve. That is not something that will come with a Computer Science degree. A general computer science degree is not someone that the tech giants of tomorrow will want to hire. They don’t want someone with a “particular set of skills”. They want a problem solver. That is why I want to build a degree in Human-Centered Technology Design and Development.

The goal of this major is to combine Data Science and Backend Software Engineering with the ideology of other disciplines to develop a broad range of skills, making me more marketable to an ever changing industry and prepare myself for both leadership and engineering jobs that don’t even exist yet.

Throughout my college career I have been searching for a major that would inspire, excite and teach me in order to prepare me for my future and all of the things that I hope to accomplish in my life time. In my two years at Green Mountain College, I jumped around different programs, trying to find the right fit, yet no matter what, I never found something that felt right to me; when my school announced that it would be shutting down at the end of last spring, I had to find another school. Despite the devastation that came with losing my college, I also was able to find Plymouth State, and hearing about the Interdisciplinary Studies program, I knew that this would be an opportunity to design the perfect program that I had been searching for over the past two years. Through taking classes, I had pinpointed the subjects that most interested me, which all seemed to fall into two main categories: social justice, and documentary studies, such as photography and journalism. I have always been interested in human rights, and movements that fight for positive social change, which led me to realize that my dream would be to study that in college, and ultimately receive a degree which would help me continue that passion. Photography and media studies have also fascinated me, and at my previous school I had almost completed a Documentary Studies minor, but because of the unique properties of that program, I thought that I could use some of the knowledge that I had gained in those classes to expand into my major. For those reasons, I am striving to create my Social Justice and Media Studies Program, in order to encompass and include all of the classes that I felt passionate about and the inspiring classes I plan on taking at Plymouth State. My plan through this major is to learn about different social justice issues, and through the focus on media, see how movements can benefit from the media, and what can be done to maximize outcomes. Although PSU does offer the Peace and Social Justice minor, I really wanted to have more balance in terms of mixing Sociology, Criminal Justice, Philosophy classes as well as, Communications, Media Studies and other beneficial classes to create the major that I believe could not be fulfilled by any of the set programs offered here.