Written by: Christopher Stoffel (css004@marietta.edu)
Marietta College offers students several opportunities to gain experience outside the classroom — including a student-led course offering work with real-world businesses.
Established in 2015, Fifth Street Consulting brings Marietta College students together to work as a team and provide services to outside clients. Rather than completing assignments solely for a grade, students enrolled in the course work toward a goal that benefits an actual organization.
Over the years, Fifth Street Consulting has worked with several organizations, including Marietta Memorial Hospital. This semester, students are partnering with the Marietta Area Chamber of Commerce on a project focused on improving its online relocation guide.
The relocation guide provides information for people interested in moving to the Marietta area. By updating the guide, students hope to make it easier for users to find information and explore what the community has to offer.
Department of Communication professor and instructor of Fifth Street Consulting Ann Nicely said the students will focus on making the online relocation guide more visually appealing and interactive. The project will also include adding links that allow the Chamber of Commerce to track how people interact with the guide. This information could help the organization better understand what resources users are looking for when they visit the page.
Although the coursework largely focuses on the Chamber of Commerce’s project, the practical experience students gain throughout the process is another important part of the class.
Students must coordinate with one another, keep their work organized, and ensure they understand the needs of the organization they are helping. These responsibilities give students an opportunity to experience some of the challenges they may encounter later on in their professional lives.
“One of the biggest focuses of Fifth Street in general is bringing students with various diverse backgrounds together, and then using their skills to create a team of folks that is able to work with an outside agency,” Nicely said.
Fifth Street Consulting is one of many experiential education courses available to students on campus. By offering these courses, Marietta College sets its students up for success in their future careers — all while still taking place in a comfortable environment where learning is at the forefront.
Edited by: Jackson Bandy (knb003@marietta.edu)
