Light Bulb

I am in the midst of searching for a Public Relations internship. This search has really made me think about my future and what my educational experience has prepared me for.

All through out my college career I have dreamed of working with a non-profit organization. Throughout my career as a PR student I have had the opportunity to volunteer with many non-profits and get hands on experience. Even though I had the deep desire to go into non-profit, I never really knew for sure what kind of non-profit I wanted to work with.

While preparing for my internship I have tweaked my resume several times creating a few different versions of my resume. One thing remains constant in every resume that I have and that is experience in non-profit health care. I never really did it on purpose or had this underlying drive to only work with health related non-profits. I have done PR volunteering with a nonprofit health clinic, a pregnancy center, and I have done several research projects relating communications and health.

Looking at my resume in this new light has given me a much clearer direction in the kind of non-profit I would like to work for. It was like a light bulb went off in my head that reminded me of how much health care interests me. It seems I found direction even when I wasn't looking for it.

Always Learning!

For my practicum this semester I am working on the 1st Annual Middle Georgia Student Diversity Conference. This has given me a new side of Public Relations. I have worked on event planning before, but not this scale of event planning.

One valuable skill I have learned is learning how to write a letter addressing a business. One of my responsibilities as a practicum student is to be the Publisher Liaison. I am in the process of contacting publishers to attend the event. I have created a professional letter inviting them to attend and also to sponsor the event.

Also I have learned how to work with a lot of people on one project. There are many people involved in the conference. I am learning how to take initiative and see what needs to be done, before someone has to ask me to do it. They all are wearing different hats in the event and it is my responsibility to make sure that the publicity side is taken care of.

In working with this event and events/projects I have learned to adapt a new kind of time management. One that is laid out very well in this article from Bizmore by Eric Reyes . On of the biggest things I have learned is not to check my email constantly, but rather to schedule when I check my email, because otherwise I will spend time responding to emails when there are more timely things to be done.

The conference is not until April and I am looking forward to more opportunities I will have grow as a public relations professional.

Twitter Challenge

This week my Public Relations Campaigns class was assigned a Twitter Challenge. We were challenged to start using twitter as means on networking and also to expand our tweet capabilities. 5 tweets a day doesn't seem that difficult at first. It doesn't seem that difficult, until it is the end of the day and you feel that you have nothing of any worth to share with the world. The true difficulty of this challenge was to use twitter as a meaningful tool of communication, rather than just a place for ambiguous thoughts.

Twitter has the power to connect the masses, but also it has the unique power to connect individuals who would otherwise never be connected. A part of the challenge was to follow more public relations professionals. I have been actively trying to follow more people and companies in the PR industry, the advertising industry and the news industry.

Several professionals have started following me back which in turn makes me reevaluate the image I am portraying on my twitter page. Having personal tweets are just fine, but if they portray me in a negative light, then my followers will see that. If I am counting on my followers to provide networking opportunities then I should be very careful how I package myself on Social Networking sites. I should try to present myself in the best way possible, not just avoiding a negative image, but building a positive image. I need to make it a goal to use thoughtful, insightful, and honest tweets to build my repuation. I don't need to pretend to be someone else, I just need be professional.

I look forward to continuing to use Twitter and other social netorks to build my repuation and to make connections.