SBS Blog > Making a 'Masters' plan by Brittany Ritell

Making a 'Masters' plan

By Brittany Ritell - Posted on 20 February 2020

Brittany Ritell is a student on the first MSc Digital Marketing Management programme at Strathclyde Business School. Here, she talks coming to Glasgow from America and how she’s found the course so far.

I always thought that eventually I would end up doing a master’s, preferably part-time while working full time and getting it partially sponsored by whomever I happened to be working for. During my undergrad years, I compiled folders of details on different master’s programmes, mostly in Boston or Washington DC thinking that’s where I would be most likely to end up when I graduated.

As always, life never goes according to the plan and I never could have dreamed the post-2015 path that would lead me to a year in Copenhagen and now almost four years in Glasgow. My international student journey isn’t a conventional one because I was already living in Glasgow on a Tier 2 Work visa for three years before deciding to study a Master’s degree at Strathclyde.

I had fallen in love with Glasgow and I had already spent three years establishing a life and friendships here. So when it came down to the search, I really only looked at universities in the greater Glasgow area. I was excited to find the MSc Digital Marketing Management at Strathclyde that covered all the digital skills that were in high demand in the field and which I thought would help me find a job upon graduation.

So far, the degree is living up to the Strathclyde motto of being a “Place of Useful Learning". This sounds like a broad statement, and it is, but in practice it looks like this:

Guest lectures from industry experts
Visits to companies doing innovative work
A module co-taught by a digital marketing agency
A “digital transformative project” which involves working with a client instead of a traditional research dissertation

Some of the biggest surprises in this course are the classes that aren’t taught by the marketing department and help expand our definition of what marketing is. The modules on Business Information Systems and Digital Supply Chains challenge us to de-silo how we approach marketing and see how it is part of a greater ecosystem in business. From these classes, we’re shown how decisions and information from other departments affect marketing and how marketing decisions have a knock on effect for other disciplines as well. While sometimes we struggle to make the connections back to digital marketing, having knowledge of additional technology can only help as we approach a workforce that is scrambling to fill a digital skills gap.

Recently, we attended a talk by the Institute for Future Cities at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology Innovation Centre to understand how cities are working on improving the quality of human lives in cities through data and technology.

On the surface, it sounds like this might be a stretch in a marketing course, maybe more suited for the Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Technology students, but the speaker highlighted how cities can use data and technology to market themselves better as a tourism destination. The classes out with the marketing department help us to understand how we can take a company’s marketing to the next level by connecting the dots with existing technology and finding unconventional ways to apply them in a marketing context, even if it isn’t immediately obvious – and this talk was a perfect example of that.

In general, this course isn’t a conventional marketing course and it challenges us to go beyond our own definitions of marketing. The nature of digital is that it naturally lends itself towards more analytical and research driven decisions – not simply posting on social media and hoping it works. The Digital Marketing Management MSc shows us how to back up each post with data from our consumers so that we know what will appeal to them and can measure success in a tangible way.