A year ago today, I was in “the cove.” It’s the dining room at Charley’s Steakhouse in Tampa that has all the fishing rods on the ceiling. I was an opener, in the middle of stuffing blue cheese olives and replenishing (read: stealing from the servers) the to-go boxes for the bar when my phone rang.

312 number. Shit. That’s Chicago.

I ran into the private dining room and shut the door and answered as calmly as I could possibly muster:

“This is Sydney.”

Rewind.

I had previously been at SXSW, came home, sent my resume to my new-found contact at Weber Shandwick and applied for an internship after graduation. I had been through phone interviews (FIVE!) and a writing test. This was them, calling me back.

Resume.

“Hi, this is Erin from Weber Shandwick, how are you?”

::cold, sweaty palms::

“I’m excellent Erin, how are you today?”

And so the small talk continues.

::jumping up and down, silently squealing in my head, and a little tear because this was actually (finally) happening::

I was offered the internship in Chicago. All of the dreaming and researching and Googling “things to do in Chicago” and Weber Shandwick-client-related-work stalking and probably-too-soon-apartment searching was bubbling over and becoming a reality.

It was April Fools Day.

This wasn’t a joke.

I hung up and called my mom. Who called my dad. Who called my sister. And I broke the news on conference call. I was moving to Chicago.

That was a year ago. It blows my mind how much I’ve learned and how much my life has changed since then. After I accepted the internship, things moved even faster than they had before. I was supposed to start in August, but started in June instead. Suddenly, my birthday weekend wasn’t for celebrating, it was for flying to Chicago and finding a place to live. I didn’t know what would happen after 16 weeks but I was ready and willing to find out.

Thank God I did.

Thank God I broke the rules and answered my phone at work.

April Fools Day will forever be remembered as the day my life sped up.

Try telling your family, friends, colleagues and boss that you’re moving to Chicago on April Fools Day. It took some serious convincing that it wasn’t a joke.

Okay, so the story goes that Gen-Y is all kinds of entitled and we expect the world on a silver platter and all that jazz.

I disagree. Until it comes to PR students looking for PR jobs.

Now, disclaimer – this is a general statement and obviously does not apply to a great deal of PR students, especially the ones I’ve been fortunate enough to mentor this year. But this does apply to people who send me one-off emails looking for a job. It may apply to you. It may not. But in general – there is this stigma about PR internships vs. entry-level positions. So on with it.

NEWSFLASH: If you want to work in Chicago (or NYC, I’d imagine, but I don’t work at an agency in NYC so let’s stick to what I know), in PR, at a big-name agency, chances are, you probably have to intern first. Period.

This is not a step back. This is not anyone undermining your education. This is not in any way insulting your intelligence. Or the institution you come from. Or all of the internships you had before you graduated. Or all of the clubs you were a part of that “got you ready” for real life.

This is how it goes. And it works.

And it’s a great thing! I thank my lucky stars EVERY SINGLE DAY that I went through the internship program at Weber before I was hired full-time. You know why? Because EVERY SINGLE DAY when I was an intern, I was learning something new – something that is expected that AAE’s (the next step beyond intern) already know. I would have drowned if I hadn’t been an intern first.

What’s more is – when you’re an intern – you have a pool of peers to fall back on, to rely on, to bounce ideas off of, and most importantly, to help you answer your questions. There are constantly interns on staff here – we have a rolling program where we have people joining the team all throughout the year. It’s fantastic the way it’s set up. When I sat down at my intern desk – there were two girls who had been there for six weeks already. There were two girls who had been there for four weeks. I was new, but I was surrounded by interns who already had the skills that I would eventually need, who could answer the questions I would eventually have.

And, to be completely honest with you, I thought I knew a lot coming in. I really did. I thought I’d walk in there and rock the house and to an extent, I did. But not as much as I thought I would. I knew the principles of PR, how to do research and I could come up with a hypothetical SWOT analysis like the best of them, but believe me when I tell you – I had no idea how the business works (and I’m still learning about that part ) and I had no idea what agency PR actually entails.

NEWSFLASH #2: Your college education doesn’t teach you ANYTHING about company politics, how an agency is run, or how you’re actually going to do your job.

At least mine didn’t. And I came from USF – one of the few accredited Mass Comm programs in the country. I thought I had a super-solid foundation for what I was about to do. I did, kinda. That being said, if you’ve gone to school, majored in PR, work at an agency now and you can say “yeah, I learned how to do this in INSERT NAME OF PR COURSE HERE,” I want to talk to you. Like, now.

School doesn’t teach you real life. School teaches you the principles about the industry so you can kinda get it and kinda understand what the hell is going on inside those four walls.

Public relations is SO MUCH MORE than what I learned in the classroom at USF. I learned more in my 8 weeks as an intern than I did in two years of PR-sequence-specific courses.

So to anyone who is still in school and looking for a job in PR, I say this: embrace an internship opportunity. More than likely, it’s paid. If I can survive in Chicago on an intern salary with all of the crazy expenses that I had when I moved here, you can too.

Embrace it because though you think agency life may be for you – and then come to find out – you may hate it. Embrace it because you can ask questions, and make mistakes, and learn all kinds of new things and have those “rookie moments” because you’re new to this whole thing. It happens.

Embrace it because if you get the opportunity to be an intern, and you rock the house, and you do really solid work and you have a skill set that sets you apart – you will get a job. Maybe not with the company that you originally intern for – but you will find work. I know dozens of interns who have gone through the program here that now have full-time jobs elsewhere. Getting your first step at a big-name agency will open up tons of doors for you. Seriously.

So stop thinking that applying for or accepting an internship at an agency is a step back or settling. I know we all dream and hope to have a job lined up after graduation because we can wave a degree proudly in the air. The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of degree-waving people. So consider an internship, even if it’s a “step back” from where you had originally pictured yourself after college. It’s not a step back. It’s a step forward. But if you see it as a step back, be it financially, a step back in “title” or what have you, it may be the best “step back” you’ve ever taken.

I know mine sure was.

Today I experienced a phenomenon that I didn’t really anticipate. Today I felt like a rookie. 

For so long, I’ve kind of been the go-to gal for various things. At school, I was the go-to gal on my team for my capstone course because I was the account exec for our client. So everyone came to me. At work, servers would come to me if they didn’t know how to ring up a drink, or they couldn’t think of what high-end scotches we had, etc. They came to me, because I knew. And I was nice about it. My first week at the internship, there was a lot of learning going on, and I felt pretty awesome at the end of every day.

Today I felt like a rookie.

Today, I was asked to pitch various social media outlets. That was the task at hand. No real direction, which left it totally open to my interpretation. So my first inclination was to reach out to my Twitter network and see if my big-players would send out a tweet or two next week on my behalf. That didn’t go over well. My approach was to ask them casually if they would reach out to their network. Five out of seven didn’t respond, and the two that did, one told me it was an odd request. So I backed off that approach as fast as I started it.

That’s the thing, it’s all about learning. Do I have a solid network? Yes (still growing, but solid). Is it appropriate to ask them casually if they’ll reach out? No. If (and the key word in this sentence is “if”) it is appropriate, then I need to do it like I would anyone else. Formally. But not too formal. These people don’t have to write anything. They’re in social because they want to be. A wise man told me I need to add value. 

So I did. Well, I tried. We’ll see how it goes. 

This whole experience is new. Yes. As far as the social media stuff goes, I’m honored that people in the office are asking for my point of view, let alone listening to it. It’s awesome. So I guess when I had my little “oh my god this is not the way to do this” moment, I felt like a rookie. But it woke me up.

So that’s the new balance I’m trying to find. I know I’m not a know-it-all. That being said, I appreciate people coming to me with questions about social. I just hope that when I don’t know an answer, they remember that this is my first agency rodeo, and I’m still learning too. I just really don’t want to let anyone down.

I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Until then, I’ll keep on keepin’ on.

I went to SXSW and fully anticipated having a ton to tell my supervisors at Moffitt. I came back and had so much to say, that we scheduled a meeting for yesterday to go over everything I learned, namely how Moffitt could use Twitter as a part of their communication strategy.

Here are some things you should consider before actually giving a presentation on Twitter to a staff that is unfamiliar.

1. Make sure you’re in a room that is technologically sound to support your presentation. We were so caught up in just getting the meeting scheduled that my preferred conference room was in use. So we went to the boss’s spacious office and had a round table with one computer monitor. Not ideal.

2. Make sure IT hasn’t blocked Twitter.com. Seems pretty commonsense, right? You’d think so. As of Wednesday last week, we had no problem accessing Twitter.com or search.twitter.com or any other Twitter-affiliated site. Come meeting time? It wouldn’t load. It was like cooking with no utensils, or ingredients for that matter. I wasn’t able to demonstrate all of the wonderful things I had rehearsed, and was forced to explain it with no visual aids.

3. Bring backup. I brought Joel Comm’s Twitter Power, a book about dominating your market “one tweet at a time”. We went over some key points briefly, but I wasn’t able to fully show the points laid out in Joel’s book since I couldn’t log on to Twitter.

4. Open it up for questions. When I realized that I wouldn’t be able to access anything, I simply opened up the floor to questions. What is the benefit? What are some demographics for users on Twitter? Are other hospitals using this? I was able to answer most of the questions, though, of course it would have been easier with a visual aid.

Do your homework. Then you’ll be successful.

On Wednesday I had a conference call with Kim, my supervisor at Chipotle, and two other SBM’s from UT and UF. We brainstormed ideas about how to get Chipotle in the student’s hands, what kind of events have worked and what haven’t.

I had briefly discussed a partnership with SGA for Election Week with one of my classmates – but nothing really took off. Until Friday afternoon. In a matter of minutes, I was planning a major grassroots campaign for our new partnership with SGA.

We thought about all the different avenues. Bringing food to the voting site, flying the burrito, encouraging voters to stop by the restaurant with their “I Voted” sticker and a USF ID, etc. We came to the conclusion that the best way to get the most reach would be to bring all the buzz to the Marshall Center voting site.

The first 500 students to vote at the Marshall Center tomorrow get a free burrito via our “burrito bucks” card. That way – the students are encouraged to vote – we get them to try Chipotle (on their own time, with their own unique order, not our standard hosted lunch items), and everyone should be happy!

This is especially awesome for all parties involved because SGA will get more votes (the whole reason they’re having the runoff), students that may not have been to the Marshall Center since it’s rehab will now see it in all it’s glory, and ::snickers:: the other guys will see what freshness and quality can do for a burrito. (Don’t like what I’m sayin – refer to my disclaimer)

So here’s a quick how-to on getting a campaign started in a timely fashion.

1. Communication is key. When my classmate emailed me asking if we had any plans to partner up with SGA, I immediately called Kim and conferenced in my classmate and her supervisor. It was a rough conversation at first, just trying to figure out logistics, as this conversation was happening at 3 pm on a Friday, with the plan to be executed on Tuesday morning. Had we not been able to connect so efficiently, both via email and phone, we might have missed this opportunity.

2. Patience is also key. While Kim and I were very excited about this partnership, it was clear that we were going to have to work quickly to get the idea off the ground. Kim had to talk to her supervisors, the store manager, and I had to be the liaison between her and SGA. In today’s society, with communication being so instant in a lot of areas, it’s hard to be patient enough to wait for people to call back or return emails.

3. Adapt, adapt, adapt. We had to resize logos, re-format graphics, and draft the announcement at least four times. You have to be able to adapt to the demands of the people you’re working for (or with) but also have enough of an understanding of the audience to be able to expect them to adapt as well.

4. Create an event on Facebook and link it to your network. This is a vital step, especially for things here at USF. Sit down in any classroom, and 50% of the students on computers will be on Facebook. By linking the event to your network, anyone affiliated with that network will be able to see the event. RSVP’s are nice because they give you an idea of how many people to expect – but for things like this, it’s more about getting the message out there for people to see.

Have you ever had an opportunity come up that you just had to pursue? What did you do to get the idea from paper to action?

Chipotle Mexican Grill has partnered with Student Government to offer the first 500 voters at the Marshall Center a Free Burrito on Tuesday, March 10th. Polls open at 9 am.

Yes, elections were held last week. This week there is a runoff. So you still have a chance to participate in the voting process.

More information about the event can be found on here.

As this leg of my education comes to a close, it’s time to reflect.  My first semester of my senior year.  I was under the impression that senior year would be a cake walk, and it has been quite the opposite.  But, all that aside, I have learned a tremendous amount this semester, both in the classroom and beyond.

In my PR Research class, I successfully moderated a focus group to gain insight to my fellow students’ awareness of the USF Federal Credit Union.  I say successfully because the building didn’t burn down, nobody died, and there was pizza.  In all reality – the success of my focus group will remain a mystery, since most of the kids that participated didn’t say much and nodded or shook their heads a lot.  That made for an interesting transcript.  I say successful because despite the boring topic, people still showed up.  I say successful because I learned about focus groups, and learned that I’m not really into moderating them, at least not for something like a credit union.

In my PR Issues class, I wrote a strategic plan.  I created, from start to finish, a strategic plan for a fictional case, and it was amazing.  I presented a case study on Margaret Sanger and her creation of Planned Parenthood and managed to exit that classroom alive after speaking on such a polarized issue.

In my PR Writing class, I started a blog, which has now morphed itself into what I have here.  I also mastered Facebooking without getting in trouble.  And I fine-tuned my media alerts and press releases in the process.  I think I gained more experience in multi-tasking and social media in that class than I did traditional writing experience.

Outside of the classroom, the most beneficial thing I did this semester was attend PRSSA’s National Conference in Detroit in October.  There, I met Penelope Trunk, who has since become a mentor of mine, and has helped me get the ball rolling on my career.

I have learned a great deal from my internship at Moffitt and after speaking with my supervisors today, we have extended my internship to go through graduation for sure, if not more after that.  I really like it here, and the experience so far has been invaluable.  I was putting everything I’ve written on my flash drive and I’m impressed with the quality and how it’s improving with each new release I create.

Next semester?  Advanced PR.  PR Design.  My internship for credit, a directed reading on social media and my last two requirements for graduation will round out my schedule.  I am excited, but nervous.  I am looking forward to SXSW and all of the opportunities that conference will bring.  I look forward to diving into social media and really getting into it and understanding it.

Until further notice, I am sleeping in, staying up late and working as much as possible so I can have lots and lots of money for SXSW.

[polldaddy poll=1168194]

As I come into my second month here at Moffitt, I figured I’d update what life is like in the day of a Moffitt media relations intern.

Today, for example, I picked up where I left off with my current projects. I am currently writing three releases, all different in their own right. Recently, a lot of what I’m writing is in regards to different physicians being awarded all kinds of grants and prestigious recognition and the like. Right now, I’m working on two that have to do with recognition, and one is a new hire.

When I’m not researching for press releases, I skim the local publications for mentions of Moffitt. Each week I put together “Moffitt in the News” which is part of the daily internal newsletter, What’s Happening at Moffitt. It outlines all of the stories in the news with links to each story.

I also call our media contacts to make sure they are current, and I file a lot of different stuff. Patient releases get mailed out to patient records and we keep a copy as well.

I feel like I should be doing something all the time, since that is the pace I’m used to in the restaurant industry. But here, it’s okay to have down time, which is unfamiliar to me.

That will be the hardest thing to adjust to, the pace.

I’m learning so much, it’s crazy! Now the question that plagues me: what kind of PR will I enjoy the most?

xoxo Sydney

For those of you that don’t yet know, I was selected for the media relations internship at Moffitt Cancer Center. I have orientation on Monday and start bright and early Wednesday morning. WOOHOO!

And though I wasn’t chosen for Bateman, I am marketing chair for PRSSA – so I help out Mr. Nate with all of his super special marketing efforts.

And I’m going to Conference in Detroit in like a month!

More on that as it comes up!

Okay, so I decided not to seize the opportunity with XFC. I went to their website and did some research and turns out I would just be handing out flyers and stuff, and there was no real set program as far as an internship is concerned. I did, however, contact Nancy Johnson from Moffitt and she is still in need of an intern for the fall. I sent her some writing samples yesterday, and I’m looking forward to hearing from her soon.

More on this battle for the internships as it comes up… And Dr. Werder said that Bateman should be decided and announced by tomorrow.

AAAH, what I would do for that opportunity.

xoxo Sydney