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In many marketing careers, and even some entry-level roles, employees will be expected to run paid ads for the company with an effective strategy. Although this is taught in undergraduate marketing degrees, students aren’t guaranteed ad experience. Even in an internship, they’re unlikely to be given a real budget to spend. 

By using a simulated budget to practice running ads through a Stukent® Simternship®, students can gain that experience and walk in the door on day one with the confidence to execute campaigns without having their hand held by their manager.

Why Are Live Ad Budgets Difficult to Implement?

A strong marketing education begins with great instruction. Hands-on experience extends that knowledge and prepares students for real work. But providing every student with live advertising budget management is challenging due to budgetary, logistical, and access constraints, hindering large-scale offerings by colleges and universities.

Here are a few reasons why using live ad budgets isn't always possible:

• Financial Scalability: Running meaningful ad campaigns takes real money. For many institutions, providing enough budget for every student to collect useful campaign data isn't realistic.

• Outcome Volatility: Working with local businesses offers valuable experience, but partnerships vary. Students may have limited access to ad accounts or budgets because those decisions are up to the client, resulting in inconsistent learning experiences.

• Accessibility and Equity: Not every student has access to an internship or client project. When those opportunities become the main source of hands-on learning, many students miss the chance to build measurable results and portfolio-ready experience.

What Are the Limitations of Traditional Marketing Assignments?

Traditional assignments, mock campaigns, and case studies help students practice marketing concepts in a low-risk environment, but without real data, students can't see how their decisions affect results. That makes it difficult to learn one of the most important skills in digital marketing: testing, measuring, and improving campaigns over time. Marketing certifications can also help students build a foundation and learn industry terminology. However, they rarely offer students opportunities to apply those concepts in ways that demonstrate business impact. Without hands-on practice, it's harder for students to build the confidence and experience employers seek.

How Do Stukent Simternships Resolve the Experience Gap?

Stukent Simternships help bridge the gap between theory and professional practice. In the Digital Marketing and Social Media Simternships, students are entrusted with substantial simulated budgets to manage across several ad campaigns and platforms. 

In the Digital Marketing Simternship, students manage full-funnel campaigns and budgets and see how their choices affect performance. As they work through each challenge, they receive immediate feedback that helps them improve. By the end of the experience, students can demonstrate to employers that they can analyze key performance indicators, adjust marketing strategies, and make data-driven decisions.

The Social Media Simternship gives students experience with both organic and paid strategies across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. They create campaigns, evaluate performance, and make decisions based on real data. Students also explore influencer marketing by comparing creators, audiences, and costs to identify the best fit for their campaigns.

For instructors, these tools are easy to bring into the classroom. They integrate with your learning management systems (LMS) and include automated grading, so setup takes just a few steps. That means you can spend less time managing assignments and more time helping students learn.

Elevate Your Marketing Curriculum Today

Provide your students with the experience they need to lead. Get free instructor access to Stukent Simternships and transform your classroom into a professional marketing agency.

If you ask a room full of marketing students if they're confident using social media, you’ll see almost every hand go up. Students spend hours every day creating and posting content, following trends, and engaging on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

However, using social media and managing it for a brand are two very different things. Professional social media marketers do far more than post content. They build strategies, identify target audiences, and analyze data. Practice with those skills will never come from personal use alone. The challenge is that many students don’t realize there is a gap until they enter their first professional role.

That raises an important question for marketing educators: How do you teach professional social media skills to students who are convinced they’ve already mastered them?

Read the Full Case Study →

The study

In spring 2025, Dr. Kristine Nicolini, Ph.D., APR, at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh studied the effectiveness of the Stukent® Social Media Simternship® in her classroom. For the first time, her students stepped into more than just a creative role. They became social media specialists for Buhi Supply Co., managing organic and paid content, working within budget constraints, and using live performance data to evaluate their decisions week after week.

Pre- and post-course surveys tracked how Dr. Nicolini’s students felt about their skills before and after the experience. The results were hard to ignore.

The results

Before the Simternship, 53% of students reported feeling academically confident in social media marketing. After the Simternship, that number climbed to 85.5%. And career readiness more than doubled, rising from 34.6% to 77.1%.

The data shows that not only did students feel more confident, they felt more confident about the right things. Before, student confidence clustered around familiarity with the platform. After participating in the Simternship, student confidence shifted toward the necessary skills the field needs: analytics-driven decision-making, paid media strategy, and ROI evaluation. One student put it this way:

"There is a lot more prepping that goes into a social media marketing plan than I thought. You can't just find pretty pictures to post and make a caption. You have to research, look at analytics, and have a plan going into it."

That shift in students' perspective showed up across the class. Another student said this:

"My understanding of social media marketing has become much more practical and strategic. I no longer see it as just posting content to gain likes or followers—instead, I now understand it as a data-driven process that requires careful planning, audience targeting, and performance analysis."

Both students realized social media marketing is more strategy than content creation alone. 

Simternships make learning accessible to everyone

Not every student walks into your course from the same starting line.

Some students have had internships, while others have run paid campaigns or managed accounts for small businesses. But the majority of students haven't had either. In 2024, Inside Higher Ed reported that there were “8.2 million college students who wanted an internship in the U.S., yet only 3.6 million had access to one, and only 2.5 million had a quality one.” In this job market, experience is expected even at the entry level. Without any experience, that gap will inevitably follow students past graduation, making it much more difficult to land a job or succeed in the one they get.

Simternships help make hands-on experiences more equitable by giving everyone an opportunity to gain career-ready skills.

Students who entered Dr. Nicolini's course with no professional experience gained the most, nearly closing the gap with peers who had already worked in professional settings.

Is the Social Media Simternship a good fit for your course?

The Stukent Social Media Simternship integrates into an existing curriculum without adding prep for instructors. And the outcome speaks for itself. As Dr. Nicolini said:

"Students graduate not just with knowledge, but with confidence, competence, and the ability to articulate their professional readiness to employers."

Stukent offers free instructor access to the Social Media Simternship and courseware so you can explore them before committing to anything.

See the full UWO case study results

This blog post only highlights the final results of this study. The full case study covers the methodology, results by student experience level, and what the data means for how we think about career readiness in marketing education.

Download the Full Case Study →

If you're curious whether the Simternship could work in your classroom, request free instructor access to the platform or schedule a demo to see the Stukent Social Media Simternship in action today!

AI is changing how students approach their work, as tools like ChatGPT and NotebookLM can generate answers in seconds.

But marketing has never been about quick answers. It’s about judgment, trade-offs, and strategy. That leaves educators with a real challenge:

How do you teach students to use AI without letting it replace the thinking that matters most?

This article explores how Dr. Claudio Schapsis of Sacred Heart University used CAPTURE, his structured prompting framework, with the Stukent Social Media Marketing Simternship to help students use AI without harming critical thinking.

From casual prompting to strategic thinking

At the start of the course and experiment, most students approached AI the same way: quick questions, short phrases, and vague requests. As one student noted, "I used to ask quick, casual questions ... like how I would ask a friend. I always thought AI would just 'figure it out.'”

That approach led to generic outputs and, in turn, generic performance.

To address this challenge, Dr. Schapsis introduced students to the CAPTURE framework:

• Context

• Audience

• Purpose

• Tone

• Unique Constraints

• Role

• Examples

The framework forced a cognitive shift, turning prompting into a deliberate skill. Students were required to slow down, stop looking for shortcuts, and define what they actually wanted before asking for it.

Students described the process as moving from chaotic to controlled. AI became more predictable and useful. The framework and application in the Simternship helped them realize that prompting is a skill and not as simple as it seems.

More importantly, they began thinking like marketers, not just prompt writers.

Read more on the CAPTURE framework

How AI enhances the Simternship learning experience

Once students started applying the framework inside the Social Media Marketing Simternship, the shift in their thinking became clear.

AI can generate ideas, but ideas without context fall flat. Inside the simulation, students worked with real constraints, real data, and real audiences.

The strongest outcomes came when students began using the simulation's built-in resources and feeding them into the AI. Instead of writing generic prompts, they drew directly from simulation materials, including the Reynolds Reports, Buhi Market Data, brand guidelines, and social audits.

This combination creates something powerful: a feedback loop between strategy, execution, and results.

The AI helped students with:

• Persona matching: Students used buyer personas like Daypacker Tom or Back-to-School Mindy to guide AI-generated captions and headlines that actually fit their audience.

• Strategic scheduling: AI helped analyze market data and best practices to build content calendars with clear timing and posting strategies for each platform.

• High-volume ideation: Organic post ideas quickly scaled, with AI generating dozens of post ideas and giving students more options to evaluate and refine.

AI handled the volume, but students handled the thinking.

They had to go through the process of evaluating which ones were most appropriate, selecting what aligned with their strategy, and refining what didn’t.

That’s the same workflow modern marketing professionals use every day.

The most important lesson: AI can be wrong

Perhaps the most valuable lesson for educators is that AI was not a "cheat code" for a perfect score. In fact, several students stated that when they relied too heavily on AI, their performance dropped.

In one case, when a student asked AI for help determining the cause of poor results, it hallucinated reasons, blaming “audience fatigue,” when data showed the real problem was incorrect targeting. In another instance, a student requested step-by-step instructions from the AI and saw their lowest score of the semester.

These AI errors taught students that AI doesn’t understand strategy; it just follows instructions. They learned that AI isn't a substitute for their work or the field, but it can be a helpful thought partner with a clear strategy.

One student added, “AI can only follow what you tell it, not actually understand the brand ... using AI works best when you already have a clear strategy."

Creating AI-ready marketers

By the end of the simulation, students weren't just better at using ChatGPT; they were better marketers. Students left the course with a better understanding of AI, with takeaways such as:

• AI speeds up ideation, not strategy

• Better inputs lead to better outputs

• AI is good for tone adjustments

• Human judgment drives results

Or as one student advised: “Use AI to help you think, not to think for you.”

The CAPTURE framework gave students a clear way to turn generic inputs into thoughtful, strategic prompts, while the Stukent Simternship created the ideal environment to put that into practice. With layered data, evolving scenarios, and defined constraints, students had the complexity needed to truly test AI, not just use it.

One student reflected on how their approach changed: “… immediately after using the CAPTURE framework, I saw a difference in the response I was getting and the results of the simulation.” That shift wasn’t just about better prompts; it showed a deeper understanding of how to guide AI with purpose.

Together, the CAPTURE framework and the simulation created a space where students could experiment with AI, see it fail, and learn why.

FAQs

How should students use AI in marketing simulations?

Students should use AI for brainstorming and analysis, feeding and validating outputs with real data from the simulation.

Explore Stukent Simternships

What is the CAPTURE framework?

It’s a prompting method that enhances AI output by setting context, audience, purpose, tone, unique constraints, role, and examples. It aims to guide students to use AI as a thought partner, not a replacement for thinking.

Read the full article

Why do students struggle with AI? 

Because they find it hard to create good prompts. AI can sound correct even when wrong. Without strategy and validation, outputs can mislead students and hinder learning.

Watch the webinar on teaching strategic prompting

What’s the best way to teach AI in marketing?

Combine a structured framework with hands-on simulation environments so students connect inputs, outputs, and results.

View Stukent AI courseware and Simternships