Katie-Ann

It has been several months since my lost post which was back in May before I began my internship at Camp ASCCA.  I had a wonderful summer at camp and thoroughly enjoyed my internship there.  I think I took a break from blogging because I did it so much this summer.  I was responsible for posting four stories a day, which was quite difficult at first.  It became more and more manageable as the summer progressed though. 

I took some time the other day and visited this blog site and read all of my previous posts.  I feel that it is time for me to begin posting again.  This site would be a terrible thing for me to waste, even if I am the only one who ever reads it.  I enjoy being able to look back at my previous thoughts and see how far I have come since. 

I am not sure how often I will drop by to write something, but I do not plan on my breaks being as long as they have lately.  In a matter of weeks, I will no longer have homework to complete, projects to work on, or tests to study for.  I will graduate from Auburn University in December and start my life in the “real world.” 

I am excited about experiencing all that life has for me during this important transition time.  I am confident that life will only get better as the years go by and I look forward to each new day and each new opportunity. 

“For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  Jeremiah 29:11

This is my last required post for my style & design class.  It is also the last day of school, which means that I will not be doing anything that requires a great deal of thought for at least the next couple of weeks.  I like that I have something to look back on though.  I looked back through all of my blog posts the other day, and it is amazing how far I have come.  What used to be so hard now comes so easily.  I find that when you sit down with a single idea in your head, that eventually the words just flow out of you.  I also looked back on some of the comments that have been made on my posts this semester and I still find every single one of them to be helpful in some way.  I truly appreciate everyone who has taken time out of their busy schedule to read random blog posts from an Auburn University PR student.  You have no idea the impact that you have made.  You have made this experience interactive.  You have made it two-way communication. 

While I may not be posting in this blog for a while, and even after that only from time to time, I encourage you to look elsewhere for my entries.  I will be regularly posting about Camp ASCCA in the Camp Journal, or blog.  I am sure that my writing there will be much more interesting than it has been here, because I am writing about stuff that I get to personally witness or experience.  I am very excited. 

Until I blog again………………

Well the class that started me on this whole blogging thing is over.  I am really quite relieved.  I just turned in one of the largest, and most time consuming projects that I have ever had to do.  I was stressed out the whole time I was working on it and now that I am through I feel as though a massive weight has been lifted from my shoulders.  I did learn many useful things through this class though.

While I was not a fan of blogging at first, it has slowly grown on me.  I think I disliked it so much at first because I needed something more to write about that my life as an Auburn PR student, or analyzing current events.  I will continue to blog, mostly because my internship this summer requires it.  I will have to blog four times a day while I am an intern at Camp ASCCA.  I do view it as a hassle at all, however, because I know that there will never be a lack of material to blog about.  I am sure that aside from my internship that I will continue to blog down the road as well.

I learned about important tools through this class: software.  InDesign and Photoshop are sure to be useful in my career.  I know that I will be much better off when it comes time to find a job if I am proficient in both.  I also am familiar with Skype, Snag-It, BrowserBob, Flash and Dreamweaver.  Though I still have a vast amount to learn about each and every one of them, I have the basic ideas of all them down. 

Though the class sometimes, or most of the time, drove me absolutey nuts, I am glad that I was forced to take it.  I learned things that could not be learned from a book.  I also have a portfolio and an interactive resume that I can use when it comes time for me to start sending out my resume. 

Well, the survey is officially over.  So is the class for that matter.  And what did I learn?  Research the client.  It is nearly impossible to find out all the information that your client wants to know without ongoing communication.  I know that the reason I struggled through this survey so much was because the client provided us with very little information.  I am not naive enough to blame all the problems on their lack of instruction, but it would have made everything else run more smoothly if they had made more of an effort.  For example, I would never just go to a caterer and tell her to make a bride’s cake and never tell that person what I really wanted it to look like.  So why would someone commission a group to do a survey for them with little and vague instruction?

I would say that something I learned is that in the future, if the client does not volunteer the information, I will find it somehow.  I would keep asking for it until I got a response or do enough research about the client that their lack of participation does not hurt the overall results.  In PR, one of the first and most important steps to getting anything done is knowing a client.  This is necessary in order to know how best to serve them or what kind of information they need. 

Campaigns and surveys are similar in regard to the client.  Knowledge of a client can make or break everything.  Client’s participation can mean the difference between success and mediocrity. 

The past few weeks have been busy and extremely stressful.  Being the social butterfly that I have always been, it has been quite difficult to make myself stay at home and work on projects and papers.  I love spending time with all of my friends and family as much as possible.  It is hard for me to spend even one day shut in without even having a friend visit.  I have had to lately, however, and I have not enjoyed it one bit.  This past weekend I was invited to go out of town for a couple of days with a few of my best girlfriends.  I had tons and tons of work to do that I had planned on focusing on those few days.  I decided to go on the trip anyway.

I am so glad that I went on that small vacation because now I feel refreshed.  I am not as stressed out as I was before I got in the car with the three of them.  I do not think about the workload that was waiting at home for me once the whole time I was gone and it was wonderful.

You may be wondering what this has to do with anything.  Doesn’t this just show that I am lazy and do not have my priorities in order?  Absolutely not.  I learned the value of distractions.  They are not always a bad thing.  Sometimes, actually, distractions are necessary.  Stepping away from pressing matters and coming back to them with a fresh mind, a rested spirit, and a happy attitude actually help get things done better.  Frustrations are simply multiplied when they are focused on for too long.

I am not saying that all distractions are a good idea.  Just spending time with a friend or my family just because it would be more fun than writing a paper is not reason enough.  I also believe that people should keep priorities in mind.  A balance between social activities and work-related activities is necessary so that all aspects of life run smoothly.  But it is okay to take breaks, both body and mind from time to time.  I highly recommend it.

I have not only caught up to what I missed getting done because of my trip this weekend, but I have also gotten a lot further than I thought I would at this point.  Imagine that!

I had a thought a few days ago as I was thinking about what I wanted to do with public relations in the future.  I definitely believe that all my knowledge of new technology such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc will be an asset.  I do have a fear in letting my future employers know that I am knowledgeable in these areas though.  I do not want to be pigeon-holed.  It is my fear that because of my technological skills that I would be expected to be the blogger for my future company.  Just because I know how to do something does not mean that is what I want to do or specialize in.

These skills will help me get a job.  I believe that I will certainly be considered over someone that cannot do the things that I can do.  Once that company does decide to hire me based on my computer/network skills, I am sure that it will expect that I will utilize those skills on a daily basis for that company.  What if I would like to focus on other areas?

So what is worse, getting hired because I can work with emerging technology and being forced to use it or not getting hired because I chose to leave out my capabilities on my resume?  I am still struggling with the answer to that question.  I know that I have sooooo much more to offer than computer skills and I want those attributes to be what makes me indispensable.

As many of you may have noticed, my blogs about survey research as of late have focused on a class project. The first group presented the results of their survey in class today. I realized that I, along with the majority of my classmates I am sure, was so focused on the tediousness of the task that I never stopped to think about how useful the information would be to each of our prospective clients. Each of our clients is invited to our classroom on our presentation day to receive our results.

I looked back at this group’s client periodically throughout the presentation and each member of that organization looked extremely interested in the findings.  They seemed very appreciative and assured that all findings would be put to good use.

It was today that it finally hit me that all this work not only had an affect on my grade, or even my learning of survey research, but that it went beyond that.  Organizations outside of Auburn University were counting on our findings either to showcase a trend or assist in decision making.

I am excited to hear about the implications that my work on my group’s research project will have on a larger scale.

I believe that this phrase is tossed about quite often on college campuses, but now I know why.  I am wrapping up my fourth year at Auburn University and I am ready to be done.  Everyone always tells me that I will miss college once I have graduated and started a “real” job.  I think I might disagree.  I have never been more stressed out than I have been in the past few weeks, and I am not one to avoid high stress situations.  I mean, come on, I competed all across the nation while I was a gymnast for 11 years.  There are only so many times where I have to give up time with my family and friends, my boyfriend in particular.

The thing about having an 8 to 5 job is that once you leave the office, you are no longer required to do anything job-related until the next morning.  There are some out there that would argue that they do take their work home with them.  Well that is fine for other people, but I intend on finding a job that does not require me to do so.  My priority in life has always been those that I love.  Usually when something is a priority it means that you spend the most amount of time focusing on that.  I may work eight hours a day, but the other 16 will belong to my family and friends.  I think that is the most frustrating part of this year.  I always long to spend time with those that I love, but it seems that they always are forced to take a backseat to my schoolwork.  I will not miss that at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I have loved my college experience.  I would not trade it for anything in the world.  It is time to go though.  I am not one who desires to be an eternal college student.  Only three more weeks of these grueling classes and time-consuming projects to go.  Phew!

 

Those of you who read this have probably noticed that several of my recent posts have been about a survey research project.  It is easy to see why it is always on my mind, because it takes up so much of my time.  I have been calling six of the top 50 newspapers in the nation for almost a week now and have only gotten a response from one of those.  Ugh!  The rest of my group members are having about the same amount of luck as I am unfortunately.  It is fair to say that all of us have been stressed out as a result of this assignment.  This leads me to the following question…. Why are we so frustrated?

I believe a large part of our stress comes from the unfamiliarity of our current position.  At least from personal experience I can say that all of my assignments in college thus far have been fairly easy.  This is not to say that there have not been time-consuming and stressful ones, but I have always been in control of whether or not I have been successful.  I wonder if we are so stressed out because we are being challenged in a way that we have not been before.  We have been forced to venture outside of a textbook and the classroom. 

Will I remember this assignment years down the road? Yes.  Is that a good thing? Yes.  You see, the easy assignments are easy to forget, and it is quite difficult to learn anything from something that can be forgotten so quickly.  I have feeling that once we are finished with this assignment and have turned in our final paper on it, that we will breathe a sigh of relief.  Hopefully, we will also think about the lessons we have learned that no amount of reading or classroom discussion could have taught us.  At least I will.

So I recently was forced to switch my emphasis at Auburn University from marketing to management.  I am not quite sure if I like this transition, but I am sure that I will learn many valuable things that will prove to be assets once I graduate.  I really enjoyed marketing, however, and always pictured it as being a better fit with my major.  The more I start to think of the things that I will learn in management, the more I believe that the ability to lead a group will be invaluable in the future. 

Apparently the current trend in PR is for practitioners to report directly to top management.  The reason I believe that we as PR students are made to take journalism classes is so that we will understand the world or journalism and how to interact with journalists.  On the same token, perhaps learning more about those in management will be useful for the same reasons.  Knowing your audience is key to any PR person’s job.  Knowing how to interact with the management in an organization, therefore, should be just as important as knowing how to interact with the media. 

Another reason classes about management are a good idea is that perhaps one day I will want to start my own business.  I would like to know the best way to organize employees and handle the day to day tasks of being in charge.  Whether I am reporting to a member of top management or am a member of that classification myself, knowing the in’s and out’s of such a position can never be a bad idea.