Give ETSU marketing students apples, some AI tools, and a chance for hands-on learning, and they’ll turn it into compelling content. In partnership with CloudWise Academy, marketing students are supporting real businesses with genuine marketing needs while using top-of-the-line AI tools. Students gained hands-on experience during the Unicoi County Apple Festival, where they met with business owners, learned about their goals, captured on-site content, and transformed it into tangible, usable marketing assets for those businesses.

“These businesses are busy with hurricane recovery and trying to rebuild. They don’t have time to do all of this,” said Michelle Sullivan, Assistant Professor of Marketing. “That’s where our student skills come in just so perfectly to match these business needs.”

In the community-engaged learning course, students learn and overcome real marketing challenges while supporting local businesses simultaneously. Another example of students using AI tools to strengthen marketing efforts is their work on the Jeremiah School campaign.

“I’ve been building websites for the Jeremiah School,” said Skylar Mitchel, a senior marketing student. “We aren’t just going to class and reading off PowerPoints the entire time but engaging and learning in a way that we wouldn’t normally.”

This hands-on learning has paid off. Every American Marketing Association ETSU chapter student who participated earned an internship with either CloudWise Academy or with the businesses they supported during the course.

“We’ve already had several businesses flat-out hire interns and start working with them outside of CloudWise Academy funding it,” said Joe McKenna, Founder and CEO of CloudWise Academy. “The success of the students and their desire and understanding clearly how they want to move forward blew me away.”