Nina Petrovic | January 21, 2020 | 7:10am Facebook Twitter emailPrint Article
Legal marijuana's place in college education is still limited, but it's starting to pay off for some University of Denver graduates.
The university's Sturm College of Law and its media and journalism programs have offered classes centered on legal weed since 2015, with the Daniels School of Business following suit in 2017. And now, alumni are beginning to make their marks on the nation's burgeoning industry.
“I was picking classes for my last quarter and thought it looked cool,” remembers Sarah Gerson, a former student of DU's Business in Marijuana course. Gerson is currently the community manager of Cultivated Synergy, a co-working space that also hosts private cannabis-friendly parties. She met the founder, who was a speaker in the class, began emailing him, and eventually applied for a job.
Taking the course helped Gerson learn more about social consumption laws and science surrounding the plant, she says, as well as the amount of work that takes place behind the scenes of legal pot, which has helped her enlighten others' views of cannabis.
“A lot of people are biased or blind about what goes on behind the cannabis industry,” she says. “It’s not just people selling weed to each other; it’s another business sector.”
Cannabis classes have also shown students new opportunities in traditional roles for college-educated professionals, according to Matt Cooper, an alumni of DU's cannabis journalism class. Taught by professor Andrew Matranga, students of the course learn how to report on developments in the weed industry. After reading more about legal cannabis and doing some research of his own for the class, Cooper discovered that applying his skills to legal pot would be the same as in any other line of work.
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