Time Flies Like an Arrow

WOW! I can’t believe a) it’s been almost a month since I posted, b) almost a month ago I graduated b) everything that has happened in between!

For starters, graduation went as graduations do; I shook President Barker’s hand, proudly watched some of my closest friends do the same and got a little bit choked up during the singing of the alma mater. There was a monsoon following the ceremony so pictures had to be postponed until after lunch, which was fine because I was famished! I think they turned out pretty OK though…

Afterwards, I spent some time in Clemson dawdling around getting my life in order. During this time, I started doing contract work for a start-up website called Come Recommended. I am the Public and Media Relations Assistant. Come Recommended is a website that connects top internship and entry-level job candidates with top employers; it is free to sign up and all you have to do is register and get three recommendations (provided on the site) and then you are in and can have access to job alerts and can chat with employers you might be interested inworking with. If you haven’t signed up, I highly recommend that you do-if for no other reason than to recieve the good advice dished out by entry-level career expert Heather Huhman.

Earlier this past semester I was offered two unpaid internships down in Atlanta-not an ideal situation when  you are just graduating and are on  your own. Obviously I only took one and I am hoping I made the right decision. I have never worked for an not for profit before so I thought it would be good to get some experience other than agency work under my belt. HealthMPowers is a not for profit that provides health education services to elementary and middle schoolers in Georgia. They come into school, give presentations and work with the teachers on furthering education on healthy decisions once HealthMPowers has finished their time at the school. As you can see, the website needs a little updating- I will be working on that this summer along with drafting the annual report and of course writing lots of press releases. More to come on my adventures!

So this crazy thing happened, literally a week before moving to Atlanta while I am packing up my life, I get an email from a giant PR firm in Atlanta asking if anyone is interested in working with this B2B boutique firm over the summer, I jumped at the opportunity, nailed the interview which I had the day I moved down here and now I am working part time as well at Weaver Stephens Group! I am really excited to be working with them and I think if anything, I will learn a ton! So far, I have been busy pretty much every second I have been there which is always a really good sign.

I am really excited about this summer and all that will be happening. Coming up (hopefully within the next week or so): where I am living, how I like living on my own, and the crazy first week I had down in Atlanta.

It’s Finally Here

Tomorrow is the big day! I think I am still in denial about the whole thing-me? a college graduate? Nah!! But, it is going to happen whether I like it or not. I am really hoping to enjoy this weekend, although I know there will be much talk about what I will be doing; and mainly where I will be living come June 1st when I move to Georgia.

While I am really excited to start the next chapter in my life, I am also pretty apprehensive. I always thought that I would have an easy time finding a really great job fresh out of school with some big PR firm somewhere close enough to Clemson that I could come in for football weekends if I wanted, but far enough that I could build a new life without living too vicariously through my friends. Little did I know these ideas are the stuff of fairy tales and rarely happen. I do consider myself very lucky however, to have been offered a number of opportunities both paid and unpaid (although not so much full time).  This summer will definitely be one where I learn lots and lots and make myself the most marketable Rachel Doyle I can possibly be! Who wouldn’t want to turn down a girl with agency, start-up corporate, freelance and not for profit PR experience…because I will have all of this experience by the end of the summer!

I think the thing that makes me most apprehensive is the financial aspect of this whole endeavor. I did not work this semester and it is beginning to be clearly obvious that a) should have worked and b) should have been a little more honest with how much the cost of living in Clemson was. I have a bad tendency to feel really bad asking my parents for money and that leads me to asking for less money than I should, which was never a problem when I was working because I made up the difference. Now that I have not been working money has been going down the drain faster than the American auto industry (that was a bad joke; I apologize) and it is really coming to bite me in the ass that I didnt ask for more money when I had the chance. Now that I am moving to Georgia where the cost of living is higher, I know I will still be financially dependant on my parents at least through the summer and that kills me because I want so bad to not have to ask for money anymore! I just want a paycheck that I worked for that will cover my expenses. I know that in a way I am costing my parents less money by not moving back home and then attempting to fly down south constantly, but I still feel terrible that I am still reliant on them so much; I always thought that I would be able to support myself financially by graduation day.

Maybe the magical money fairy will swoop down and give me a winning lottery ticket….

Senior Tribute

This video was shown last week in my sorority chaper meeting. While I have been a little burned out of the whole sorority thing for pretty much this whole year, watching this video made me very nostalgic about the fact that all those things they say about the girls you meed through a sorority. The girls I have met through Theta really are some of my closest friends, and although there is a significant chance I would have met a handful of them some way or another; I am blessed to call them my sisters as well. It has been a great 4 years being a sister of Kappa Alpha Theta and I look forward to continuing my journey of being a Theta for life…maybe longer.

I Don’t Remember the Last Time I was This Jealous

Yesterday the last week of classes started. When I say I am floored at how quickly the past four years have flown by, it is an extreme understatement. I remember before I started my freshman year of high school (!) and someone telling me that high school went by fast! High school was NOTHING compared to college and how quickly time flew. The past few days I have been thinking about where I was four years ago and where I am today. Location-wise I am 542 miles from where I was four years ago, but mentally and emotionally sometimes it feels like lightyears. My baby brother is in the exact same shoes I was in four years ago: he has committed to a college and is biding his time until graduation, trying not to skip school too often and relishing his time left in the little bubble of Oakton High School. I remember the time well. I will never forget bursting into tears in Senior Seminar with 2 of my closest friends because we were not sure if our high school boyfriends would last through college (they didn’t and I’m not terribly sad). I remember having major reservations about going to school where I knew no one and would be at least 4 hours from most of the people I had grown up with. I worried about a lot of unnecessary things (even more unnecessary than having to eat alone or being to lazy to get to know my neighbors). I say that they were unnecessary now because I made it through more than alive, I flourished! I have loved (almost) every minute of my time at Clemson and I am so envious of my brother who is headed off to college in the fall. I thought that just like high school the end of college would be bittersweet and I would be ready to leave, it is not! While I have not burst into tears in class yet, I cannot help but think back on my worries about college and truly wish that they were the only things I had to worry about. I suppose if to this day the only thing I had to worry about was whether or not I got into a good sorority and being homesick, that would indicate that I haven’t  made very much progress in my life. And I suppose with any new change comes reservations. I know I am doing the right thing by not moving home and trying to gain more experience in PR before starting full time, but I still can’t help but wonder if there is a way to conveniantly have to do the whole thing over again? I think I feel an urge to become a microbiologist….(anyone who knows me would know that would be the worst career choice possible)

Stay tuned for a retrospective of the past 4 years, but until then here is a teaser:

A Time When I Thought Times Couldn't Get Any Better-July 2005

What basking in the best 4 years Thus Far Looks Like-April 2009

PR is a Process

While perusing through my blogs of choice today, the latest post on The Bad Pitch Blog really resonated with me. It was entitled “Why PR Doesn’t Happen Overnight” and it basically stated something that everybody knows but sometimes forgets: PR IS A PROCESS!!! You cannot expect that everyone you pitch to is going to immediately be talking about what you pitched the next day. PR is about starting a conversation about what you are pitching. If you do land a story after one pitch or catchy release you can’t expect that the whole story to be there because the story that you are trying to tell comes out over time. There is no silver bullet.

I started thinking about this idea of PR being a process and I started seeing connections between this PR process and my current job search in the PR industry. I am realizing that finding a job in PR is a process as well. I met with former colleague Tara Healy from Jeff Dezen Public Relations yesterday at the Clemson Career Launch Day and she had some very helpful and refreshing advice regarding finding a job. She, like BPB described the best and most important part of PR is the conversations and the relationships you foster. In terms of interviewing, she said there is no silver bullet that will get you the job. It is all about the conversation in the interview; if you can carry on a conversation with your employer and ask them questions that stretch their brains just as much as you are stretching theirs, you are on the right track. There is a good chance that you will land the job after many conversations because one conversation is just not enough, the same way just one pitch is just not enough. Finding a job and pitching a story is also all about reaching out and making contact. There is no shame in asking someone to put in a good word for you or to put you in contact with someone they know. Hey, why do you think LinkedIn is so popular-it is just that: a virtual good word! While I may not be an expert at anything I am talking about I am loving learning all that I can in hopes that it eventually lands me in the right place. Now, if only I were better at practicing what I preach…

In other news: the Clemson Spring Game is on Saturday! I am excited/sad that it holds the potential of being my last Clemson game for a very long time. Also, there are only 11 days of class left…so much to do!

Unecessary Fears

Now that Spring Break has come and gone it is time to hunker down and finish out the semester strong. While my senioritis has not seemed to have waned, I have noticed that I have started thinking realistically about my future a little bit more. I am coming the realization that if I don’t know exactly what I am doing come May 8th it is OK; many people do not. I am also realizing that moving to Atlanta even though I do not have a job there will not hurt me, rather it will make me more accessible for that day when jobs become abundant, or at least less sparse.

Yet, with all of these positive realizations I have also noticed that I have developed some silly fears. While I don’t lose sleep over these fears by any means, they are often on my mind:

1. I don’t like eating enough to spend lots of time cooking for just me…I worry I will spend the next year or so subsisting off of pasta and raw veggies.
2. I won’t have anyone to go out to eat with me and will have to confront my fear of eating out by myself.
3. I will become addicted to bad television for lack of something better to do on a weekday evening
4. What does one do with all the time they have once it is not occupied by school/schoolwork?
5. Loneliness

So, in summary my fears include having too much time on my hands and either not eating or eating terribly. These are both issues that I can easily cope with but they do come to mind every once in awhile and when they do, I have nothing to do but to laugh to myself because I know everyone is probably thinking the same thing right before they go out on their own, but how many people blog about it?

Some Catharsis

Recently I was applying for an internship at a large firm in Atlanta and they posed a question that made me thing long and hard:

Please write an essay (approximately 400 words) on your most challenging situation, how you handled it and the outcome.

One would think that this would be an answer that would just pop into my head, well it didn’t. But, I was pretty satisfied with what I came up with:

I have been very lucky in that my life has not been fraught with many significant challenges. I have grown up in an affluent area with two parents; success came easily throughout both high school and my time at Clemson. Now that my time at Clemson is drawing to an end, I seem to be faced with the biggest challenge of my life: weathering the abysmal job market. My dream is truly to have a career in public relations and this dream really is no secret, I have been talking about it and doing everything I could to learn as much as I could about it since I was a sophomore in college. Everyone I have spoken with over the past two and a half years has told me that I would be a great asset to any firm I decided work for, thus making the prospect of finding employment sound just as painless as applying to college all over again (which in retrospect was a piece of cake). I have come to find that in these current times, nothing about jobs is painless and finding employment and in turn my total independence has become the biggest challenge I have ever faced.

It is difficult to hear from those who have gone before me that I have done everything right when doing everything right feels as though it is getting me nowhere. Unfortunately, the life I have led where things have come relatively easy for me is beginning to come back to haunt me. I am not used to this much uncertainty about my future and it is a very scary thing for me.

It has taken awhile, but I am beginning to accept the fact that currently doing everything right is not enough, I am going to have to be flexible and keep my chin up. There are no magic words to be said to make jobs appear, but they will come eventually and all I can do is bide my time and get more experience any way I can so as to not get rusty when it comes to PR. The outcome is still undecided but I know whatever it may be I am sure to learn, grow, and succeed

A Little Spring in my Step

After the freak “blizzard” we had on Sunday, the weather has been steadily gotten better. As of right now it is 61 degrees with clear blue skies. This weekend it is supposed to be in the low to mid 70s! This makes me more than excited and as a result I have started making anticipatory lists of things I am excited about for spring and also things I want to do this spring/before graduation (roughly 63 days away…eek!)

Things I am Looking Forward To:

• Freeing my feet from closed toed shoes and socks (ick, I am not a fan of socks)
• Wearing skirts
• Wearing sundresses
• Getting sun kissed freckles
• Going for walks
• Going out on the lake
• Laying out
• Walking to get ice cream and eating it outside
• Eating Dinner on the deck
• Longer evenings
• Cookouts

Things To Do Spring 2009:

• Go camping
• Go hiking at Table Rock
• Play tennis at least twice a week
• Bring back Friday evening cookouts
• Spend at least one weekend relaxing on Lake Wylie
• Take a spontaneous roadtrip
• Enjoy every minute of the next 2 months
• Get excited about my future

Now, I am hoping that this warm weather trend sticks around because I will be awfully sad now that I have gotten all excited about spring. Speaking of which, Spring Break starts a week from today! I’m spending the first weekend of break in Atlanta with my best friend and our significant others and then am going on a road trip with my mom to Hilton Head for a few days! Hopefully I will get some sun and relaxation in!

Extra Extra!

Thursday afternoon I was updating my status on Twitter when I came across a tweet by @TVAmy that there was a bank robbery in Greenville! With hostages! Now before my Twittering days I definitely would have turned on the TV to follow this story or Googled the crisis to see if a story had been uploaded. Not this time. I watched the Food Network and followed the story unfolding on Twitter. I was updated when authorities arrived, when the situation had been controlled, and when the suspect was arrested. It was fascinating but it made me think about the fact that had I not been tweeting, I would have followed this story on television, if at all. Does this mean that Twitter has the potential to lure users away from watching late breaking news on TV? I think yes. If Twitter had been more than an idea on April 17, 2007, when the shooting tragedy occurred at Virginia Tech people at the scene could have updated from their phones onto Twitter that they were fine but scared, or what was going on minute by minute inside Norris Hall. I think we would have gotten updates much more quickly from people living the tragedy than hearing the same thing over and over which is what we heard on the news. For someone like me who had close friends at Virginia Tech, I was glued to the television for the entire day trying to gain some sort of semblance that my friends were ok. Had we all been on Twitter, they could have tweeted about their experience and updates would have come much more quickly thus easing the minds of many. But, in the same vein would that have caused information overload? Granted, the crisis I was following on Twitter on Thursday was extremely minor in comparison to a crisis of Virginia Tech’s magnitude, but it is something interesting to think about. Does Twitter have the potential to provide all of our breaking news and lead us to watch coverage on TV? Thoughts?

How did this Happen?

Like every other senior in college this year, I am having a very hard time finding that dream job. I know what I want to do (Agency PR), and I suppose it is partially my fault  that  I have not landed anywhere close to that dream job. I am being kind of picky about the location in which pursue my  career goals (between Charlotte, NC and Atlanta, GA) which seems to sort of limit my options. I have been told by those wise ones who have gone before me that I shouldn’t expect my first job to be THE job. While I have applied for many THE jobs, I have also applied for many plain old pay the bills jobs. I have heard back from a few plain old pay the bills jobs and have been unpleasantly surprised with what I have discovered during my interviews with these companies: direct sales and public relations/marketing have become synonyms.

How in the world did direct sales and public relations become one and the same? After my third “public relations/marketing” interview in a row yesterday I got to thinking about the similarities between direct sales and what I have been taught PR and marketing are.

I can see how direct sales and cold-calling to pitch to someone can be considered the same thing because theoretically, they are. When a PR pro calls to pitch to a newspaper a story about the benefit of pop-up campers to budget-savvy travelers, they are essentially asking for the journalist to take time (which equals money) to write about something that they may not have necessarily written about. When a direct salesperson knocks on a business’s door and asks if they would like to upgrade their telephone plan they are asking directly for the business to spend money in a way that they may not have necessarily considered. Both direct sales and PR require an individual to pitch an idea or product to someone else who is not going to be sympathetic to what you have to say. I think the difference that I am having a hard time  with is the fact that in PR your livelihood depends on how well you can be an expert on what your client has to offer while in sales your livelihood depends on how much of what your client has to offer you can sell to other people. I am not a shy person, I have no problem talking your ear off about a great idea you might want to buy into, but I am absolutely terrible at asking for money (surprisingly)!  I was that Girl Scout who only sold cookies to people she knew would buy them so inevitably the only people I ever sold to were my family members.

I suppose in this economy, commissioned sales need and can take all the help they can get and I may just happen to find that I am great at selling to complete strangers and it may become my dream job. But for now I will just have to be patient and let everything play out: I think I am worse a being patient than I am at asking strangers for money. Que sera sera.