It All Comes Together

Public relations is fascinating.  The growth of and the need for it make the industry’s potential limitless, and as PR majors, we find that there is just about nothing we can’t do with it.

The classroom experience is just one-third of a whole.  We develop skills that will set us apart from our peers at other schools.  How many students can say they know how to conduct a press conference or have gained real-world experience with clients in a class?  Internships are the second part of the whole.  We build our confidence as professionals when we’re thrown into the real-world mix.

I’m finding that Innovative Public Relations is the third part, completely what makes UCM’s Public Relations department top notch.  For students that claim that the PR program should focus more on business, IPR is for them.  I had a writing-intense internship, that dealt less with client relations, and more with content creation.

IPR completes the circle for me.  The “business” meetings, client relations, and hands-on experiences have already prepared me in the ways my internship didn’t.  The biggest thing I’ve found about the classroom, the internship, and IPR is that everything I’m doing is intersecting in a way that shapes my understanding of the industry.

This semester I’m taking integrated marketing communication, a class I’m thus far enjoying.  We analyze different ways companies advertise, whether it be through television, print or social media.  The practices all come into play in IPR, where we discuss different methods of connecting with audiences.  While the work for IPR is on a much smaller scale than, say, a big company’s ad campaign, the idea is still the same:  use different mediums to build and maintain relationships with key audiences.

That being said, public relations is planned with the audience in mind.  The skills we develop in class and the external experiences start coming together to make us stronger professionals.