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Articles by NU Editorial Contributors
June 22, 2025What Can I Do with a Strategic Communication Degree? [Updated 2026]
A strategic communication degree is an interdisciplinary program combining public relations, advertising, marketing, and digital strategy, preparing graduates to craft purposeful messaging, engage target audiences, manage reputation, and measure communication outcomes across channels. The degree is a specializing standard communication training with a deeper emphasis on professional communications theory, business communication, and the applied skills needed for roles in corporate, government, nonprofit, and healthcare organizations.
June 16, 2025MPA vs. MPH: Which Degree Should You Choose?
A Master of Public Administration (MPA) and a Master of Public Health (MPH) are both graduate degrees oriented toward public service, but they address different problems with different tools. An MPA is operationally oriented, focused on how to run, finance, and govern the organizations that deliver public services, while an MPH is clinically oriented, centered on how to prevent disease, improve population health, and design health interventions at the community and systems level.
June 16, 2025What is Strategic Communications?
Strategic communication is the purposeful, goal-oriented use of messaging by an organization to fulfill its mission, aligning communication initiatives with business objectives so that targeted, consistent, and measurable messages reach specific audiences at the right time to influence perceptions and behaviors.
- June 8, 2025
Inside Info: Skills You Learn in Human Resources Courses
Human resources courses develop a blend of interpersonal and technical skills designed to build productive workforces, mediate conflicts, and navigate the legal and strategic dimensions of people management, with both soft and hard competencies essential for effective HR practice at every career level.
June 6, 2025What Do Special Education Teachers Do?
Special education teachers support students with learning, behavioral, physical, and cognitive disabilities, adapting curriculum, implementing legally mandated learning plans, and teaching academic and life skills to help each student access education and develop independence. Core responsibilities include developing Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that outline specific academic and behavioral goals, required accommodations, and support services; adapting or creating curriculum materials so students can access content at an appropriate level and pace; monitoring student progress and adjusting IEP goals and teaching strategies in response; collaborating with parents, general education teachers, speech therapists, counselors, and school psychologists; and integrating assistive technology and specialized software to support communication, reading, and writing.
May 23, 2025What Is a DHA Degree?
A Doctor of Health Administration (DHA) is a professional doctoral degree designed for experienced healthcare administrators seeking executive leadership, policy, or consulting roles. DHA programs prepare healthcare leaders to manage, streamline, and improve the performance of medical organizations, including hospitals, private clinics, and long-term care facilities, and are typically completed in four to five years, often in hybrid or fully online formats to accommodate working professionals.
May 10, 2025Dissertation Defense Guide: How to Present Your Research
A dissertation defense is a formal presentation in which doctoral candidates present their research findings to a faculty committee, an oral examination that assesses the candidate's ability to articulate their research, justify their methodology and results, and address committee questions with clarity and confidence. Most defenses are scheduled for approximately two hours and are open to the public, though formats, time limits, and protocols vary by institution and department.
April 26, 2025Careers in Health Informatics: Where Healthcare Meets Technology
Health informatics careers sit at the intersection of healthcare, data science, and information technology, with professionals managing electronic health records, analyzing patient data to improve outcomes, implementing health technology systems, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as HIPAA.
April 12, 2025Information Security vs. Cybersecurity: What’s the Difference?
Information security (InfoSec) is the broader discipline protecting all organizational data assets, across physical, human, and digital domains, through policies, risk management, compliance frameworks, and physical controls. Cybersecurity is a specialized subset of InfoSec focused exclusively on defending digital systems, networks, and data from electronic threats including malware, phishing, ransomware, and unauthorized access. The relationship between the two is hierarchical: every cybersecurity decision is an information security decision, but not every information security decision is a cybersecurity decision, InfoSec sets the foundational rules and risk frameworks that govern how the organization protects all its information, while cybersecurity handles the technical implementation on the digital frontier.
April 2, 2025What Is Integrated Marketing Communications?
Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is a strategic approach that coordinates all marketing channels and messages, advertising, public relations, social media, direct marketing, and sales promotion, to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling brand message across every customer touchpoint. The IMC framework is grounded in consumer behavior and psychology and emphasizes the customer, not the product, as the central focus of all communication strategy.
March 29, 2025What Can You Do with a Marketing Degree: 10 Career Paths
A marketing degree opens pathways across six core career tracks: digital marketing, brand management, advertising and promotions, market research and analytics, public relations, and product management. According to BLS data, marketing managers earn a median annual salary of $161,030 as of May 2024, with overall employment of advertising, promotions, and marketing managers projected to grow 6% from 2024 to 2034, faster than the national average and approximately 36,400 openings projected each year.
March 26, 2025What is a DNP Degree?
A Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) is the highest clinical degree in nursing, a terminal, practice-focused doctorate that prepares expert clinicians and healthcare leaders to translate research into real-world clinical practice and improve patient outcomes and healthcare delivery systems. The DNP differs from a PhD in Nursing in purpose and focus: the DNP develops clinical expertise, leadership, and quality improvement competencies for direct practice and system-level leadership, while the PhD develops the research and theoretical scholarship that builds the scientific foundation of the nursing profession.
March 19, 2025What is a Dissertation?
A dissertation is an original, in-depth research project typically required in doctoral (PhD) programs, designed to contribute new knowledge, insights, or theories to a field through independent research and analysis, representing the pinnacle of academic achievement and culminating in a formal dissertation defense before a faculty committee. In American academic usage, "dissertation" refers to the doctoral-level document, while "thesis" refers to the shorter research project completed for a master's degree, though in many other countries these terms are used in reverse or interchangeably. Lehman
March 13, 2025How to Become a Penetration Tester
Penetration testers are ethical hackers hired to simulate cyberattacks on an organization's computer systems, networks, and web applications, identifying security vulnerabilities before malicious actors can exploit them using the same tools, tactics, and techniques as real-world attackers.
March 6, 2025How to Become a Nurse Anesthetist
Becoming a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) requires seven to ten years of education and clinical practice: four years for a BSN, one to three years of critical care experience as an RN, and approximately three years in an accredited doctoral nurse anesthesia program (DNP or DNAP). ICU experience is not optional, most nurse anesthesia programs require a minimum of one to three years in a high-acuity critical care setting, and competitive applicants typically have three or more years, often supplemented by the CCRN (Critical Care Registered Nurse) certification.
February 24, 2025Criminal Psychology vs. Forensic Psychology: What’s the Difference?
Criminal psychology focuses on analyzing patterns in criminal behavior, identifying the social and environmental factors behind crime, and developing theories that explain why certain individuals commit offenses, with the primary goal of understanding, predicting, and preventing criminal acts. Forensic psychology, by contrast, applies psychological principles broadly across the legal system, ensuring that psychological factors are appropriately considered in legal decision-making processes.
February 20, 2025Demand for University Credit Transfer on the Rise
A new study by National University reveals that interest in credit transfer has been on an upward trajectory since 2021. This variation not only reflects changing student behaviors but also signals a broader shift in how students approach their educational journeys. Key Takeaways Seasonal Patterns Over the study period, average yearly search interest demonstrated a ...
February 17, 2025Clinical and Non-clinical Psychology PhD Programs: What’s the Difference?
Clinical and non-clinical psychology PhD programs both represent doctoral-level training in psychology, but they prepare graduates for fundamentally different careers. A clinical psychology PhD integrates scientific research with direct patient care, requiring supervised clinical practicum hours, a year-long APA-accredited predoctoral internship, and a dissertation, and leads to state licensure as a psychologist, qualifying graduates to diagnose mental health conditions, provide psychotherapy, and conduct clinical research. A non-clinical psychology PhD focuses exclusively on research, theory, and experimental investigation in areas such as cognitive, social, developmental, or industrial-organizational psychology, without clinical training or APA clinical accreditation requirements, and prepares graduates for careers in academia, behavioral research, data science, or organizational consulting.