Report Card on MTV College Rep Project

Imagine getting college credit for conducting a contestant search for MTV’s game show “Remote Control,” featuring comedian Colin Quinn. Or for setting up “MTV Wild Card” parties to tie into the channel’s “Club MTV” dance show. Or for working with a MTV production crew on “Spring Break” in Daytona, Fla.

Sound too good to be true?

It isn’t. Students at 10 colleges around the country, including USC locally, are receiving up to four college credits for being their on-campus MTV representatives.

At USC, the program is worth up to four credits depending on the number of hours the rep devotes to it. Students of any major are eligible to receive credit for the program, which counts as a general elective course.

MTV launched its college rep program on 10 campuses last year. The program is now on 20 campuses (only half of them grant college credit), and is slated to expand to 30 to 40 campuses in February.

While some will say that this is the ultimate “mick” course, Tammy Andrews, the USC rep, says it has real educational value.

“To me, it’s almost more valuable than taking a regular class because I’m getting a lot of first-hand experience,” said Andrews, a senior majoring in business and marketing.

“They send me a skeleton of a promotion and I have to go ahead and produce the event, doing all the budgeting and advertising. It’s a lot of work. I have to utilize everything I’ve learned to pull these off and make them successful.”

The students aren’t paid, though MTV director of marketing Sharon Moran said there are occasional opportunities to earn some money from the channel.

But MTV gets a lot more out of it than just free labor.

“We’re finding out the interests of this audience,” said Moran. “We’re able to tap into our student reps to find out what the latest trends on campus may be: What are students wearing these days? What are they reading?

“This word-of-mouth approach complements the more formalized college research studies that we’ve been involved in since last September. If we wanted to get immediate feedback to an idea that we might have at the channel, we can have our reps conduct informal surveys among students on their campuses.”

This feedback can help MTV’s bottom line as well. “Knowing what our students on campus are interested in at any given point allows us to create sponsorable programs which meet advertisers’ needs as well as being attractive to the students,” Moran said.

But the colleges receive no money for participating in the rep program.

“They look at our program as a valuable opportunity for the reps, and also view the activities that we bring to campus at no charge to the university as exciting, free entertainment for the student population as a whole,” she said.