I’ll add on to what Bob said that you slid through our program without taking PR Writing with either one of us, which is one place where social media is strongly emphasized. You must have had one of our adjunct profs. In PR Writing, I have for several semesters had students writing blogs. They are also now recording podcasts or videos for those blogs and creating a social media press release.

PR Research has changed a lot since you were in that class with me. The students now do interviews over Skype and create podcasts of those interviews, conduct a social media monitoring project, and use photo or video to create and share an ethnography project. All projects are not posted to their blogs. I’m always looking for new ideas.

My hope is that students will leave the program with a blog that will serve as a portfolio for their school projects and that they will know how to work with social media. The next step is really to push them to understand strategy of social media, and perhaps that is something that could happen in the PR Issues and Advanced classes, which are two that I don’t generally teach.

You can check out my blog to see the course assignments and some of the student blogs.

We have PROpenMic.org where there are 4,600+ students, faculty & pros from around the world talking about PR and emerging digital media.

I would love to work with you to enable your dream to come true. As you’ve heard discussed, PROpenMic can be your platform. Write to me and I’ll do whatever I can to help you!

That said, university curriculum should reflect the current state of the field. The challenge there is that some educators have limited practical experience. As a result, they focus on what they know: research and theory v. applied communications. I don’t know what to do about this, it just is, and the academic hierarchy is set in place to facilitate it.

There are also academic limitations based on the current curriculum. Our major takes place over three semesters and due to limited resources, there isn’t much room to add new classes. I’m all for having an entire course (or two) on social media, but the department does not have the resources to offer them. It’s a challenge, but the kind all communicators face: do more with less.

Finally, I might add, the only reason you had little or no SM training at USF is because about 10 percent of PR majors make it through without having my classes. If you would have, then you would have joined a long line of students who use the experience to start their own social media journey. You’ve done wonderfully, given your passion. I expect even bigger accomplishments in the future.

What’s the role of college? To teach you to think? Or to give you tangible skills you can immediately take into the job market?

Ideally, it’s a marriage of both. I don’t want this to turn into a “when I was your age” kind of post, but I went through the advertising program at U of I in Champaign longer ago than I’d care to admit. It’s a great program. I learned a lot. But my teachers were not futurists by any stretch of the imagination; they said that potentially, we would be creating ads on computers. That maybe illustrator programs would be used. Yet there were pockets of us who thought that was definitely the way the world was moving.

The fact that you’ve formed a POV on what you think may be lacking in your education means, in a way, you’re more than armed to start your career.

I think Nisha pretty much articulated exactly what I was going to say, but I’ve come this far so I want to contribute anyway!

Less than a month after I graduated I e-mailed the head of my graduate program with articles, etc. explaining the importance of social media. I also got other students that graduated with me to articulate the role social media was playing in their lives (and jobs). Note: Most of them didn’t even know they’d have to deal with it.

I spent the better part of a year trying to get GRADUATE students to understand why they need to be on LinkedIn.

The real challenge is going to be convincing them that it’s important, that it’s going to impact their future.

I wish you all the best with this initiative. I think it’s going to be a good one.

That Aaron Strout guy is pretty darned cool.

Ryan