Seniors enrolled in Marketing 485 partake in service learning projects each semester set to help them gain real world experience and provide different departments in the university necessary research at no cost to them.

According to J. Robert Field, assistant professor of marketing, he sends emails out before the start of every semester asking the various departments of the university if they need any research done to better improve that department. He reviews the applications and chooses the applications that his students will do for the semester.

“We provide services to give the students real world experience for whenever they graduate and get out there in the field,” Field said. “We provide these professional services at no cost for the departments.”

This semester, three marketing seniors enrolled in the Marketing Research course will take on the project of Student Publications. Their job will be to survey faculty, staff and students in order to receive data on Nicholls Worth readership and La Pirogue yearbook distribution.

Jessica St. Pierre, Marcus Fox and Thomas Barrios have been creating an online survey asking various questions such as how much they know about the weekly newspaper distributed on campus and how much they read it as well as how many students pick up their yearly yearbook.

“We are waiting to get approval for our survey and it will be up online soon,” Barrios said. “We encourage all students and faculty to participate in the survey.”

According to Field, the services that these students provide could range as high as $15,000 minimum in the real world but it is free because these students are gaining experience and would like to get a hands-on approach to what they will be doing after graduation.

“We are slowly but surely progressing with the project,” Fox said. “We are just trying to get as much information as possible so that we can gather a wide range and accurate data.”

The website that the survey will be going up on is qualtrics.com. There will be an opportunity for all students to answer the questions open, honestly and anonymously.

The three students assigned to this project are required to complete it from start to finish on their own as a group however, Field will be available to guide them in the right direction.

“The drafts for the survey are complete, our group came up with all the questions so that we can provide the best data for student publications,” St. Pierre said.

Once the data is collected, the marketing students are required to write a research paper along with an oral presentation to show their results of the study.
The group will not only give out a survey, but they will also crunch the numbers to show how many newspapers are distributed weekly, how many yearbooks are ordered yearly, and what percentage of students are actually picking them both up.

“I know that the students will be able to provide some great data for student publications so that they can use it in their future endeavors to track their project,” Field said. “I’m excited to see what data the students can collect.”