What You Learn in School Could Unexpectedly Help You in Life

By: Hannah Rhoad

This past week I had the opportunity to compete in the Miss Missouri Pageant held in Mexico, Missouri. What an experience! One I will soon not forget. While preparing for the pageant I had to pay attention to current events because I had to be ready for any question that might be asked in interview. When people ask me why I compete in pageants, I say it’s not just for the scholarships but it is because I enjoy competing. I enjoy making the friends that I compete with year after year, I enjoy the people I have the opportunity to meet, but most of all I compete because of the skills that I learn along the way.

Aristotle once said, “One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.” This is one reason I believe that hands on learning works so well when it comes to the field of public relations. Last summer I took a class that was solely based on media training. Media training was a class that focused on how to conduct press conferences as well as how to handle the media in a press conference. We could be taught how to give press conferences for weeks, but until we had the opportunity to practice one we did not know if we could successfully manage a press conference. Yes preparing for the press conferences was hard because I was unsure what type of questions would be asked by my fellow classmates, or the reporters. By being put into this position it taught not only myself but the rest of the class that we all could survive a press conference. We all learned that it is always better to be over prepared than under prepared and that we had to be prepared for unexpected questions at any point of our public relations careers.
Having my interview at Miss Missouri was not that different than walking into a press conference. The most important thing to remember was to relax and only talk about what I know to be true. When I was preparing for my interview I treated it like  I was going to give a press conference. For every topic that I thought I might have a question about I had a notecard that I made with two or three key messages or short points that I wanted my judges to know about that topic. This is just one of the skills that I learned in media training that I have used in my own life.

When it comes down to it, pay attention to the skills and lessons that you learn in school. They may come in handy when you least expect them to.