Immersion in the Startup Scene

With tech giants such as Tesla, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, and Google, the Bay Area is undoubtedly home to some of the world’s most successful and innovative startups.

In 2017, Northwestern launched a program to take advantage of the area’s booming tech, media and entrepreneurial scene. Called the Bay Area Immersion Experience, the program sends 12 Medill School of Journalism and 12 McCormick School of Engineering students to San Francisco for one quarter to learn through experience about design innovation, digital communications and the dynamic intersection of technology and culture.

All 24 students take the same four classes — two focused on design and two focused on media — taught by Medill and McCormick professors in Northwestern’s state-of-the-art education and innovation space located in the heart of the city’s financial district. Students complete onsite visits to local startups and form interdisciplinary collaborations to work on hands-on projects of their own. 

“Through these classes, I saw how helpful it is to work in a team with people from different backgrounds,” said Medill student Sasha Costello. “You clearly see the same things differently, and amazing things can happen when you brainstorm together. The solutions are much more creative.” 

One such creative solution was borne out of the program’s Design Innovation Practicum. McCormick design professor Elizabeth Gerber challenged the students to find new ways to use social media to organize political involvement. Through research into social media and civic engagement, students realized that after controversial events such as divisive Supreme Court rulings or hotly contested elections, political activism tends to spike dramatically. But as these same events fade into the rear view, activism begins to wane. 

A student team comprising two journalists and two engineers proposed a solution called “Political Pokes,” which aims to combat activism fatigue. A more personal interaction than group pages, the Facebook widget nudges users to attend protests, participate in marches and sign petitions. 

“We made journey maps and stakeholder maps,” Costello said. “That’s where my journalism background helped. We interviewed people and did research on who was affected by what we were creating.” 

Costello and her team also benefited from local Northwestern alumni, who live and work in San Francisco’s startup scene. The program taps several of its more than 13,000 Bay Area Wildcats to serve as advisers, including Andrew Prince (Medill ’08), a content strategist at Instagram who advised the social media activism projects. 

Medill has also launched a new technology and business graduate journalism specialization. And McCormick co-hosts another interdisciplinary experience with the Pritzker School of Law.

While the palm trees and temperate weather might convince students to return to the Bay Area after graduation, Medill professor Owen Youngman hopes others will bring their expertise back to Chicago and serve as leaders in the Midwest. “Tech is a different but important culture in the Midwest,” he said.