Arts, Media & Communication
Welcome to the Career Community Resources page for Arts, Media, and Communications!
Below you will find helpful resources for career exploration, industry trends, additional internships/job opportunities, and alumni stories. If you would like to discuss your interest in working in the arts, media, and/or communications, please schedule an appointment with me in Handshake.
The Big Picture
The Arts, Media, and Communication career path is for students who are passionate about creativity, storytelling, and making an impact.
Do you want to create? Careers in this field include performance, design, visual arts, sculpture, music composition, and other creative disciplines.
Are you more interested in interpreting and sharing creative work? You might thrive in roles such as curator, educator, critic, researcher, or journalist, helping audiences connect with art, ideas, and culture.
Do you enjoy bringing creative work to life? Consider careers in arts administration, marketing, fundraising, event production, advocacy, or talent management, where you’ll support artists and creative organizations behind the scenes.
If you’re drawn to media and communications, opportunities continue to grow across digital, print, broadcast, and emerging platforms. Whether you’re interested in journalism, film, television, radio, podcasts, social media, sports, music, or fashion, there are countless ways to tell stories, inform audiences, and shape conversations.
Careers in this field rarely follow a straight path. Many professionals build their careers by exploring new opportunities, developing diverse skills, and creating their own experiences. Stay curious, seek out hands-on learning, build your network, and be open to where your creativity can take you.
What You Can Expect
This career path may be a great fit if you:
- Enjoy expressing your creativity through performance, design, writing, multimedia, or by supporting creative projects behind the scenes.
- Want to make an impact through storytelling and communication, using words, images, audio, video, or digital media to inform, entertain, or inspire others.
- Are curious about culture, current events, and emerging trends and enjoy researching, creating, and sharing content that connects with diverse audiences.
- Like collaborating with others to bring creative ideas to life, whether in a newsroom, theater, museum, production studio, nonprofit, or creative agency.
- Are adaptable and entrepreneurial, recognizing that success often comes from taking initiative, building experience, and embracing new opportunities.
Areas of Focus
Here are seven areas you can explore within this broad career path:
It is quite common to talk about these 3 areas of work together. Although they are all interrelated, there is a significant difference between the three.
Advertising is the means of communication to a target audience using mostly paid media such as television, radio, the Internet, and print publications.
Marketing is the overall process of communication and delivering products to a target audience through the marketing mix of product, price, place and promotion.
Public Relations is a communication method used by businesses to convey a positive image to a target audience and the general public. Examples of PR methods include but are not limited to, press releases, community involvement, and speaking at public forums on issues important to a target audience.
This area includes a wide range of topics related to development, construction and engineering, interior design, landscape architecture, and urban planning.
A career in social media typically involves working to raise awareness of a company’s mission, products, programs, and services among its customers by communicating with them across social media channels. To accomplish this, the person in this position might create written stories, blog posts, messages, and videos and disperse them across social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube.
There are the big networks and studios (NBC, ABC, Fox, Viacom, Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures, Disney and more) and plenty of smaller, independent shops too. Roles range from in front of the camera to pre- and post-production positions in music, sound, lighting, writing, costume, effects and of course acting. New York and Los Angeles are the major geographic centers of this entertainment business.
Theater, Dance and Music make up the core of this area. Whether your dream is Broadway, Lincoln Center, Hollywood or something else, there are sure to be hours spent diligently practicing and perfecting your craft. Combined with a little luck, and surrounding yourself with the right people, the performing arts could be the career for you.
Work in museums, galleries and auction houses encompass this area. Art educators and therapists, public art programs, arts advocacy groups, and community arts organizations operate primarily, but not exclusively, in the non-profit sector. The commercial art world, which concerns itself with the buying and selling of arts objects, is a for-profit arena. Auction houses, art brokerages, galleries, and commercial art dealers fall within the commercial art arena.
For someone considering this career area, the key is getting as much writing experience as possible and to read, read, read. If you have a natural curiosity, like to write and write well, thrive in time-driven situations, know how to ask the right questions, and have good interviewing and listening skills, these areas may be a field worth considering.
