PROF 311: Professional Practice

This professional practice course prepares students for further professional and educational opportunities. Students gain practical and critical, conceptual, and theoretical skills. Topics include project management, business formations, the fundamentals of proposals and contracts, intellectual property and the complexities of authorship, budgets and financial administration, the market planning process within the private and public sectors, and the social role of the artist or designer. Larger societal constructs are examined as well as assumptions about the nature of professional practice research and discourse. The goal is to provide students with the knowledge and skills to enter the cultural or design sectors with assurance, awareness and integrity. Through faculty and guest presentations, individual and group research projects, students learn to identify the ways in which the artists and designers respond to their cultural, social, and economic contexts.