Higher Education Communications
Research features, faculty and student stories, and enrollment content for universities and the agencies that serve them.
Universities are full of people doing work worth reading about. The hard part is that the people who understand the work best are rarely the people with time to write about it — and the people with time often can't tell which part of the research actually matters.
That gap is most of what I do. I've written faculty research features, student success stories, institutional announcements, and enrollment content for research universities, medical schools, and the marketing agencies that serve higher education clients.
Two kinds of work
Higher education communications usually splits into two jobs that look similar and aren't. Most writers are decent at one.
Research communications
Bringing faculty and student research to a wider audience — prospective students, donors, industry partners, press. This means interviewing researchers, understanding the work well enough to know what's genuinely new about it, and writing something a smart non-specialist will finish.
Recent examples include underwater robotics and sensor fusion at Stevens Institute of Technology, biomedical innovation and diagnostics at Weill Cornell Medicine, and an NSF-verified Broadening Participation in Computing plan. The subjects vary; the problem is always the same. Say what the work is without either flattening it or hiding behind the jargon.
Enrollment and brand content
Content built to move prospective students toward applying. Blog posts, program pages, resource guides, and web copy — written to each institution's brand and editorial guidelines, with SEO built in rather than bolted on afterward.
I write this work on a ghostwritten basis for a higher education marketing agency serving more than 50 universities, colleges, and trade schools. That means switching voice between institutions, holding each one's messaging accurately, and translating academic material into something a seventeen-year-old and their parents will actually read.
Why the combination is uncommon. Research communications writers often can't write conversion-minded enrollment content. Enrollment marketers often can't sit with a faculty member for an hour and come away with an accurate story. Most universities need both, and end up hiring twice.
In-house experience
Before freelancing, I directed marketing and communications for a school of engineering and science, co-managing the communications budget and supporting the positioning strategy behind enrollment for priority academic programs.
That work covered the full project lifecycle for brochures, web copy, and marketing collateral, plus content strategy, project planning, vendor management, and brand alignment. I wrote student success stories, faculty research articles, and press releases, led the creation of the school's first two annual faculty research reviews, and wrote the official announcement of its new dean. Over that period the school rose seven spots in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
It matters mainly because it means I know what it's like on the other side of the brief — the approval chains, the dean who wants a paragraph added, the deadline that moves because a grant announcement moved. Working with me shouldn't feel like managing a vendor.
What I'm typically asked for
- Faculty research features and researcher profiles
- Student success stories and program spotlights
- Conference, symposium, and event coverage
- Annual research reviews and institutional reports
- Press releases and leadership announcements
- Enrollment blog posts, resource guides, and program pages
- Editorial management for ongoing content programs
- Editing and developmental work on drafts written in-house
Working together
Most engagements start with a single piece — a research feature or a set of enrollment posts — so we can both find out whether it works before committing to anything larger. From there it often becomes an ongoing arrangement: a regular flow of stories, or editorial management of a program with several contributors.
I'm based in the New York City metro area and work with institutions across the U.S. If your communications office is short-handed, or your agency needs a writer who won't need the academic material explained twice, that's the work I do.