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CMDI students develop their creative, analytical and investigative skills through hands-on projects that prepare them for the challenges they’ll encounter at work. Here are 10 impressive projects from the college’s first decade, along with a look at where these students are now.

Tessa Diestel (Jour’18) was on the 2018 Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowship team that covered “,” which received a Murrow award, among others. The fellowship brings together top journalism students nationwide to report and produce in-depth, multimedia projects for major news outlets.��

Diestel and Ashley Hopko (Jour’19) worked with students from 19 universities, reporting on hate crimes, racism and intolerance in��36 states. Diestel is currently an associate producer at ESPN.

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Francesca Rubin (Comm’19) was director of partnerships for the —the first time the annual speaker series was organized entirely by the college. She and her team secured sponsorships from various companies to support the event.��

She is now an account executive at the fundraising consulting firm Hudson Farris, in New York City.

Audrey Mayes (MMediaSt’22) launched a podcast,��Where the Aud Things Are, highlighting rural perspectives related to wildlife conservation, as the final project of her master’s program.��

She then hosted Remington’s podcast as a marketing manager with the Kinetic Group before transitioning to the health and wellness space. She currently serves as the director of marketing and strategy at Lifeplus.

Reporter��Hannah Prince (Jour’22) and photojournalist��Alex Levy (Jour’22)��investigated fentanyl use for a reporting honors project, which was between the �鶹��Ѱ�����Independent and The Bold.��

After pursuing a career in public relations, Levy switched to product marketing and is now with Zayo Group; he also runs a professional cycling program.��

Prince is a segment producer of special events at ABC News, covering daily news and producing major U.S. and international news coverage. She embedded with ABC’s investigative unit in Uvalde, Texas, to report on gun violence following the 2022 school shooting, and was an associate producer for the Emmy-winning news documentary��It Happened Here—A Year in Uvalde.

Jordan Wirfs-Brock (MJour’11, PhDInfoSci’22) wrote an article for��, a collaborative journalism initiative, that includes a history of U.S. coal production set to music. She is an assistant professor of computer science at Whitman College, teaching students creative, multisensory ways to communicate data.��

She is working on an NSF-funded project to develop tools that allow people to reflect on the sounds in their lives.

Virtual reality experiences in her classes inspired skiing instructor��Natanya Chatfield (CritMedia’24) to create��. The project—a first-person skiing journey for VR headsets and YouTube—makes adaptive skiing more accessible by breaking down barriers people with disabilities face in starting the sport. She is now a social media intern with a local Denver studio.

Hannah Stewart graduated from CMDI in 2019 with a degree in communication. She covers student news for the college.