Once the lines started to blur between communication based majors, MSU decided to create a program that would allow students to collaborate and work on projects with others in different, related fields.

These CAS 100 and 200 level courses are focused on building a community between the different majors, Gude said.

At the end of the last spring semester, Gude and students, like journalism junior Carly Belsito and advertising senior Isabel Lopez, teamed up to create the Media Sandbox Creatives student organization.

"The cool thing is most of the student organizations on campus are all from a certain unit — they’re journalism student orgs, advertising or PR," Gude said. "This has students from all of the units so they get to know each other."

Students will be working on projects together to get to know each other while networking, doing creative things and having fun, he said.

Freshmen and sophomores make up a majority of members, which made the start up of the program a little difficult.

"(Members) kind of have an idea of what they want to do but they haven’t developed the skills yet," Belsito said. "It is just another step in their learning.”

So far, the organization hasn't done any large projects, but they visited the Grand Rapids Art Prize last semester where they shot photographs and videos and made advertisements and flyers for the event.

The group has broken down into four different teams to tackle individual parts of a larger task to incorporate various mediums — web, video, design and advertising crews.

"The plan is to help them get a feeling of what they want to do," Belsito said. 

Belsito, who is the president of Creatives, said the group has plans to work with local non-profit Michigan Bone Health Association to revamp their social media, website and logos.

This project was inspired by Media Sandbox's street team's non-profit work last spring during their travels to Austin, Texas to watch Gude speak at a design conference. 

By the end of the semester, Creatives hopes to put together a commercial, taking one person from each of the four groups and choosing a product to promote. Belsito said they will be pulling staff to teaching sessions in editing, shooting and copywriting. 

The overall goal for the organization, no matter what tasks they work on, is to build members' portfolios and start to better themselves quicker, Belsito said. 

“We want to have fun, we want to do creative things, and we want to create things that are fun projects in an interdisciplinary and collaborative way,” Gude said.