I have dreams and a few shaky ideas, but nothing concrete.
I'm 22 and I have no idea what exactly I'll be doing after graduation. With the economy the way it is, no direction is a terrifying prospect for me.
I should have started looking for a job last fall, but without a direction, it's hard to know what I'd be good at or in.
To that end, if I were to do it over again with a P.R. major starting from freshman year these, in no order, would be my emphasis:
- Take computer science classes: everything in P.R. is going online and mobile, directly to your phone.
- Psychology: Edward Bernays, father of modern P.R., understood the essential nature of psychology in dealing with different publics (who are made of individuals). That hasn't and will never change.
- Technical and creative writing classes: technical writing and editing can only improve writing skills, which, like news classes improve the basic skills essential to communicating with publics.
- News-ed writing classes: we can't forget our history, we come from a news background and we work with gatekeepers who handle our communications. Learn what the gatekeepers like as well as improve design and writing skills (public affairs reporting and feature writing, especially).
- Research: the first letter in RACE and most important step in P.R. I prefer documents, they're easier to hunt down--although people humanize writing.
- Marketing: for P.R., integration seems to be the in thing to do. Marketing is essential to P.R. because we're marketing our message.
- Sociology: similar to psychology only we need this to understand how to reach a group dynamic.
Now to really get crazy, if I could change the general-ed requirements they would be cut down to this:
- Three hours of history
- Three hours of civics and governments
- Five hours of foreign language--I hated the idea, but
- Three hours of basic math, you know, the kind essential to living--making a budget, balancing a checkbook, etc.
- Four to five hours of basic science
- English--business letters, resumes, etc.
All of these are essential to a basic understanding of everyone who has ever been through college.
I still don't have a direction in life, but maybe one day I will. I hope this blog post can help out at least someone who's interested in going to the the public relations field.
