BIC's "Day of Curiosity" draws a crowd

The first ever BIC Open House was held on February 27th and welcomed over 30 candidates to City College to tour the campus, meet BIC program director and faculty, and experience life as a "BICster."

CEO Ketchum NA Barri Rafferty

BIC's "Day of Curiosity" kicked off at noon where an SRO crowd attended MCA's "Lunch w/Leaders" lecture featuring CEO of Ketchum North America and BIC Advisory Board Member Barri Rafferty who eloquently spoke about her recent trip to The World Economic Forum in Davos and 8 Global Trends Impacting Communications (look for a full write-up soon).

Curious candidates then took a tour of the City College campus (led by BIC student, Nehal Mahmoud) which features the first Gothic-style buildings designed for an American college. For the more curious among us, there's an excellent exhibit currently at the CCNY School of Architecture about George Post's architectural masterwork. Or read the article, "The Very Model of a University," in The New York Times link HERE.

The West Gate of the Gothic Quad

At 5PM, BIC Program Director Nancy Tag was joined by BIC faculty Gerardo Blumenkrantz and Frank Walton for an Info Session on BIC. Starting with "high tea" and ending with a Q&A, curious candidates heard about BIC's 36-credit, portfolio-driven curriculum and unique approach to teaching branding and integrated communications. The audience discovered why BIC could only happen here at City College -- where multi-cultural energy is part of our DNA, access to academic excellence is integral to CCNY's mission, and our location in the media capital of the world goes beyond our proximity to midtown, but is embodied by our amazing adjunct faculty, lecture series, advisors, etc. 

Program Director Nancy Tag leads the Info Session

Our ever-curious guests were then invited to stick around and join Professor Frank Walton's BIC class "Branding Issues & Intangibles" in the Public Relations course sequence to learn alongside BIC students about country branding -- or location marketing. Starting with a quick summary of the course to date, Professor Walton (who also heads the BIC public relations track) then asked students to consider such questions as "who owns Brooklyn -- or Times Square?" "how can you leverage the attributes of a place?" and "how can branding make us appreciate the value of origin?" The lecture took students around the globe from upstate New York to the Rio Olympics in 2016.