By: Mike Adamczak

For the past couple of weeks, I have had the privilege of being able to work with the wonderful people at the Marketing Communications (MarCom) Department of Genesee Community College, thanks to the Upward Bound Program. In these past few weeks I’ve learned some useful skills that could be used in a future career such as how to create the most professional portrait picture possible, create and collect data from a survey, as well as my most favorite of all, how to fly and take video with a drone. Check out this Awesome Video of the drone following me up the spine at GCC!

The drone was most valuable to me because it allowed me time to talk with Tim Lawton, Online Communications Specialist for GCC and Upward Bound Alumni. While assisting him as the Visual Observer, as well as helping teach three classes on how useful a drone is in advertising; we discussed the importance of why going to GCC would be a great choice to start off when going for a bachelor’s degree and what to look for the most when figuring out which college is the best fit for you.

As well as assisting in drone flying, I was also given the task of performing a survey of my fellow Upward Bounders. Along with my work study partner Fermina Sanchez, we worked to present original questions on what social platforms are most used today by high school students and which would be best for GCC to advertise on. Our findings are blow!

As part of our work study duties, the Marketing Communications Department at Genesee Community College had us survey 51 of our fellow peers in the TRIO Upward Bound program. The purpose of this survey was to determine which social media platform would be most beneficial for marketing advertisements.

• The average age demographic of our data set was 15 year olds, with a majority of the answers coming from female students (n=35) as opposed to the male students (n=16). When asked what social media platform was most often used for social interaction, we found the majority of students preferred snapchat (n=32).
• We found that when browsing the internet, most people do not notice or pay attention to the online ads (n=20).
• The data showed that the SUNY Website and College Board website were most commonly used for college research (n=19/19).
• Something interesting that we noticed about the data would be that although a majority of students found themselves spending most of their time on snapchat, colleges would have the most success catering to students personally through emails (n=14).
• Most students found that the cost of tuition is information that they would most want to be made readily available on a college’s social media profile (n=13).
• When asked their opinion on whether or not there was a general stigma that community colleges are less rigorous and professional than four year colleges, most students said they agreed or strongly agreed (n=26) or remained neutral (n=22).
• As expected, most students found that the greatest influence in their life when considering colleges would be their family (n=21), but to our surprise there was also a large amount of students who felt that they had no outside influence and they formed their opinions independently (n=20).
• Finally, when asked what students found most important to have at a college when making their final decision, the majority said that the college would need a wide variety of academic programs (n=14) and that they would need to have quality instructors and professors (n=14).

For their participation in our survey, each participate was put into a raffle for a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble. During free time, we pulled a winner. Congratulations Karley Greenman and thank you everyone for helping us with our market research!