As seen in the spring 2025 Ivy magazine.
Taking a unique approach to boosting students’ learning potential, professors at the Ivy College of Business often seek input from professionals and companies off campus. These experiences significantly benefit the students by introducing a real-world perspective to their learning.
While the guest input is often in the form of guest speakers, Priyanka Jayashankar, adjunct associate professor in marketing, took an alternative approach. For her Marketing 4430 and 4540 courses, Jayashankar added a class field trip to the curriculum, which allowed her students to gain firsthand experience with the focuses of their respective class projects.
Marketing 4430
As the capstone course for marketing, Jayashankar’s Strategic Marketing Management course is centered around business situations, which often take the form of project work. During the fall 2024 semester, the course partnered with Cultivating Hope Farms (CHF), a care farm in Ames, Iowa, creating opportunities for inclusion and acceptance for those with autism and all disabilities.
In partnering with CHF, the goal for students was to learn how to develop effective service marketing strategies for creating an inclusive campus environment. Jayashankar’s research interests in market inclusion of persons with disabilities and sustainability often align with the class projects she assigns to her students. The strategy development for this project followed suit by centering around disabled individuals, specifically focusing on neurodivergence.
“Students benefit from experiencing the diversity of needs, abilities, and backgrounds of the participants at the farm,” said Gina Perkins, co-executive director of CHF. “Spreading awareness on a societal problem is the first and most crucial step toward developing an effective solution.”
Visiting CHF also helped students build a more established and meaningful connection to the focus of their project.
“Reading or hearing about an organization is nothing like visiting it in person,” Perkins continued. “You can engage all of your senses to emphasize the value of CHF’s mission by highlighting the importance of the cooperative relationship between the land, animals, and participants.”
Many students held this sentiment as the visit undoubtedly added a substantial benefit to their experience with the class.
“It was great being able to see the work going into their facilities, along with the care and love they brought to each element of their day,” said Jared Frie, a senior in marketing from Monticello, Minnesota. “Being able to provide anything that could be of use to them became a greater desire following the field visit. What Dr. J did for us by allowing for a real interaction with the organization made the whole project more understandable and created a stronger connection to CHF and their vision.”
The experience also left a genuine impact on the students. Interacting with the animals and the CHF community created an exciting and memorable experience while being informativefor all parties involved.
“The field visit to Cultivating Hope Farms helped my capstone students visualize how to develop a campus model and service portfolio for a unique venture centered on market inclusion for persons with varied abilities,” said Jayashankar. “My students learned how recreational and therapeutic services can be more compliant with the American Disabilities Act (ADA) in other contexts based on what they saw at CHF.”
With the capstone course often being one of the final major-specific courses taken by marketing students, this type of experience makes for a perfect finale to their collegiate journeys.
Jayashankar continued, “I hope my students not only gained hands-on insight into service marketing but will also extrapolate this experience to other marketing contexts in the future.”
Marketing 4540
In Jayashankar’s Entrepreneurial Marketing course, students visited Seeded LLC, a produce startup founded and run by civil engineering student Cole Lindaman, who is also a former student of Jayashankar. Making for a perfect collaboration, the marketing students were able to gain preliminary insights into developing market segmentation strategies focused on Lindaman’s microgreens.
“Having a hands-on learning space is great for understanding the scope of projects and what assets can be utilized to make something come together.”
— Cole Lindman, civil engineering student, founder, Seeded LLC
“As someone who is more familiar with traditional farming methods, visiting Seeded LLC was incredibly impressive,” said Ariel Eliomo, senior in entrepreneurship and finance. “The way they grow microgreens with such precision and care really stood out to me. It was fascinating to see how technology and innovative farming techniques are being used to optimize growth in small spaces.”
In courses centered around project work, developing a solid understanding of the project’s focus is crucial to providing beneficial insights.
Eliomo continued, “This visit gave me a new appreciation for how niche markets like microgreens are evolving and how marketing strategies can effectively highlight the health and sustainability benefits deriving from Lindaman’s operations, which tied closely to what we’ve been exploring in Marketing 4540.”
The visit to Seeded LLC provided a level of understanding beyond what can be developed in a classroom and sparked creative avenues for students that would become key elements of their projects.
“Gaining experience with the basic process of how things are produced is extremely valuable in marketing. I believe that touring the facility helped students come up with more creative and feasible developments in their work,” said Lindaman.
In addition to creating an exciting learning environment and promoting creativity in strategically approaching problems, courses like Marketing 4430 and 4540 courses are great examples of the unique ways Ivy students are set up for successful transitions into the modern workforce.
