One year ago today, I packed up everything I could fit in my car, took my last final at USF, and hit the highway to Orlando. I spent the night at my parents house and hit the road first thing in the morning for my new life in Chicago. Okay so technically my anniversary with Chicago is on the 19th, but I officially checked out of my life in Florida on the 17th. So today, I celebrate.

It’s been one hell of a ride, I tell you.

I took my last final on June 17, arrived in Chicago on the 19th and started my internship at Weber on the 22nd. Time flies when you’re having fun. And working your face off. And networking like a machine.

I have been blessed with incredible opportunities, both personally and professionally, in my first year here in the Windy City. I’ve traveled to ten different cities, visited home six times, had one super-awesome-thought-it-would-only-happen-in-my-dreams speaking opportunity, several opportunities to teach colleagues about social media, been to what seems like a cajillion networking events, driven thousands of miles, made snow angels for the first time in ages, and eaten in some of Chicago’s most spectacular restaurants.

I’ve also had some moments where I questioned the entire move. Moments where I was pretty sure that moving to Chicago was not a good choice. I’ve freaked out, calmed down and freaked out again. I had moments sitting in my studio where I was pretty sure that my student loans would swallow me whole. I had moments at work where I felt like I was just one step behind where I needed to be, where I questioned why I spent tens of thousands of dollars on a college education because they sure as shit don’t teach corporate in college.

I have been blessed with mentors and mentees around the country. I write about that a lot because I have a sick love affair with all things mentoring. It’s single-handedly the most important part of my career as I continue to navigate and understand just what exactly I want that path to look like. I’d have to say that this has been my favorite part of living here, being in the real world, and being thousands of miles away from home. The people who have taken me under their wing have provided an incredible amount of support and guidance and to be honest, that’s what keeps me sane.

I’ve never had so many sub-groups of friends in my life. I have work friends, social media friends, friends of my roommates and now my skydiving friends. It is a totally different experience. In Florida, I had work friends. In Kansas, I had school friends. I don’t know if this comes with living in a big city or just being outside of college, but I like it. A lot.

Chicago, you’ve done me proud so far. You better keep it up.

Is there anything on there that you’ve already done? Anything you want to join me in doing? Tell me about it!

Cancer is one scary beast. That’s what we call it in my family, “the beast”. My mom was diagnosed with oral cancer when I was a senior in high school, literally weeks before my senior prom. She’s now seven years cancer free. YAY! GO MOM!

When I found out earlier this year that a colleague of mine has an aggressive little beast of her own – I was quick to relate and console and offer advice and be funny. When you’re talking to people who have cancer, at least in my experience, they can definitely use a good joke – because there isn’t much to laugh about when you’re going through chemo and radiation and surgery after surgery.

I passed her my guardian angel that my mother gave me after she was diagnosed. As a spiritual ambassador for Florida Hospital, handing out the little guardian angel coins is her “thing” – her way of spreading joy and love and hope to those who really need it.

It’s been great to see how much love has come pouring out for my friend that I work with. One of the women she works with here is running the Chicago marathon in her honor. I wanted DESPERATELY to do something like that, but let’s be serious – I hate running. I’m doing a 5k while I’m 25 to cross it off the list, but I can genuinely say that my body wasn’t built for running.

If you know me in my personal life, you know that I’m making grand plans to get USPA certified to skydive solo this summer. I’m starting at FreeFall University out at Chicagoland Skydive Center in mid-to-late June and I couldn’t be more floored.

I was lying in bed last night talking to a friend on the phone about how I enjoy jumping out of perfectly functioning airplanes and I tried to explain the logic to him. How I think clearly, I value life more when I land, and I always call my parents to tell them I love them before I jump. I’m sure me trying to explain that to him was like my best friend trying to explain to me how she can just “go for a run” and come back 13 miles later like it was no big thing.

Then it hit me.

Skydiving is my marathon.

I can’t run for crap, but (hopefully) I can jump out of airplanes solo. Pending my certification – I’m going to Jump for the Cause. The cause, of course, is breast cancer. This will be my marathon, my donation, my contribution to my colleague’s world that she’s living in.

If you’ve been affected by cancer – personally or through friends/family members – what are some cool and creative ways you can raise awareness?

And, pending my certification – wanna jump with me?

One of the things I’ve been super-jazzed about since I graduated last year has been this whole relationship-building thing. Not limited to those that include romance and flowers, I’m talking about new friends, working relationships with colleagues, and my favorite, the relationship one can have with a mentor.

Do you have a mentor? If so, was it someone who was assigned to you? Did you seek this person out yourself? Essentially, there are two species of mentors – ones that are assigned to you, either by an employer, educator, coach, or boss and then there are the ones that you seek out, serendipitously meet, or just kind of come into your life and take on that role.

While I can’t help you with the first camp, I can speak to how to work on the whole finding a mentor thing.

There are three steps that will help you get on your way.

1. Identify the type of mentor you’d like. In a professional/career-type mentoring relationship – are you looking for someone who can advocate for you and your skill and help guide you through your career? If so, perhaps you should look to someone who is a couple (or several) levels above you in the hierarchy. If you’re looking for someone you can vent to, I’d recommend sticking to someone more around your same position, someone who understands the day-to-day of working at your level. While it’s great to have a senior staffer who understands you and how you work and what makes you tick, sometimes you just need to grunt about junior-level stuff. And that’s totally okay.

I’d also recommend that you have more than one mentor – find someone in your organization and find someone outside. The more people you work with, the more people you meet, the greater chance you have at people advocating for you when the time comes. It’s never a bad thing to have good people around you.

2. Get creative with your approach. Chances are, the person you’ve identified as your mentor-to-be is incredibly smart, has their shit together and has a lot of knowledge to offer up. That being said, they probably have lots and lots of people they’re working with. They probably have people coming to them all the time with questions, with the hopes that they’ll get an answer, let alone, a mentor.

With Aaron, that was how it went down. He was speaking for a bit at the Mashable party at SXSW and he sounded like he knew what the hell he was talking about and that he could possibly have some nuggets of goodness to pass on to my almost-grad self. I thought he might be an important person to connect with. So, armed with my newly acquired flip cam, I marched up to him and asked him to answer one simple question – “what one tip do you have for the almost-grad?” Following the interview, I was again impressed with his answer, how much he “got it” and was hell bent on learning more. So, I told him just that, and the rest, as they say, is history.

3. You have to give back. The biggest part of being someone worth mentoring is just that – being worth mentoring. You can’t just run up to someone and take, take, take and not offer up anything in return. Granted, there isn’t much by means of knowledge that I have to lend these folks that have taken me under their wing. But I do bring boundless enthusiasm, an eagerness to learn and turn that around and offer up that knowledge to the people I’m mentoring. Be a rising star, be eager, do good work that is worth recommending, and it’s just a big happy cycle of rainbows, sprinkles and brain power.

In the end, it’s all about surrounding yourself with great people. If you want to make it in this biz (PR, marketing, digital, social, emerging, LIFE, whatever) you have to continually surround yourself with the best and the brightest. I’m fortunate to have a handful of these people in my life. I thank my lucky stars every. single. day.

So what’s your take on mentoring? Over-rated? Best thing ever?

Drive.

It’s something you can do in a car. It’s a quality you can hold, that whole “being driven” thing. It’s a part in a computer, or at least, it used to be.

What is drive to me?

Well this weekend, it was two of the three.

As I was wrapping things up on Friday, I was talking to my mom and decided that I wanted to come home to visit. Like, now. Fortunately, after my last non-business traveling debacle, I was armed with three roundtrip flights on AirTran to use at my discretion, blackout dates permitting.

So I hurried out of the office, hopped in a cab, only to realize I left my keys on my desk. There were two ways this could go. If I went back to my office, back to my apartment, tried to book a flight and then went to the airport – there was no way I was making the last flight out. Or, I could just take a cab back towards the office, call AirTran on the way, and then go to the airport.

I went with option B.

So the plan was, I’d call AirTran, book the flight in the cab, stop by the office and pick up my keys and the miscellaneous t-shirts I have from different events so I’d have clothes for the weekend, and then I’d just hop on the orange line.

Instead, I booked the flight, and as the cab driver was getting ready to drop me off at the office, I had him take me to Midway instead. I’d buy clothes when I got to Florida (hello, no 10% sales tax).

So I am on hold with the AirTran lady and the next flight OUT of Florida that I’m eligible for is on Wednesday – which CLEARLY isn’t an option. I book the one-way down there and I start checking Kayak and Southwest for cheap one ways back to Chicago on Sunday or first thing Monday morning.

Nothing.

Or, $400 worth of something.

I ask my well-traveled friend Peter for any tips or tricks since the guy flies like 350k+ miles a year. He recommends booking a flight as round trip and just not using the second half. Good thoughts for the future, but for this particular incident, that wasn’t an option either.

So I realize that I really didn’t think this through. There was no planning. I didn’t have any clothes (the less important piece of the puzzle, as I went bonkers in Target on Saturday morning), I was in Florida and had two options – spend $400 I don’t  really have room to spend on a ticket, or drive. The drive didn’t sound so bad, but making it alone sucks. So I thought maybe one of my friends would like to take a road trip, stay with me in Chicago, and then fly themselves back the next weekend or something. But then I remembered (with their help) that most people PLAN things like this, they don’t just do it.

So I drove. By myself. Windows down the whole way because it was 75 and sunny from Florida on up. It was the most amazing drive of my life. Great tunes, got my “driving time thinking” session in (all 19 hours of it) and was reminded of how AWESOME my little hybrid is on road trips.

What’s more is, of course, I learned something about myself this weekend.

When I want something to get done. It gets done. When I commit to something, I stop at nothing to see that it happens. And, when I’m in a tight situation, there is ALWAYS a solution. There is always an answer.

This is true, obviously in my personal life as evidenced by this weekend, but in my professional life as well. We can plan and plan and plan and plan, but when it comes right down to it, shit happens that we don’t plan for and we need to think of a solution. Usually quickly. We need to be resourceful.

I’ve committed to my career here. It’s happening. I wanted to go to Florida this weekend, I did it. I want to get certified this summer so I can skydive by myself. And I start my classes and Skydive U (seriously) in late June, weather permitting.

Kids, when your parents say you can do anything you set your mind to, they’re spot-freakin-on. You just have to conciously make that decision, not him-haw around about it and wonder if it’s the right thing. Make the decision. Own it. If you screw up, you screw up. Chances are, nobody’s life in in danger.

Unless we’re talking about skydiving, then, well, if I screw that up, I’ll miss each and every one of you.

What does drive mean to you? Do you have it? How do you tap it?

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.

“How much did they pay you to give up on your dreams?” – Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in “Up in the Air”.

…is a quote that I think rings true with a lot of people in the workforce. Especially with the job market being as tough as it is – a lot of people are settling for less than their dreams. A lot of people don’t even know what their dreams are.

But this quote doesn’t ring true to me. For me it’s more, “how much did they pay you to REALIZE your dreams?”

There is a lot to be said for job satisfaction, dreams and opportunities. I remember a year ago I had NO CLUE what I wanted to do. I was sitting in my PR Design course – rocking Adobe CS4 and checking out a placement program called the University of Dreams. Through this program – for a mere $8,000, you can pick your industry and a location and get an internship (and there’s a lot more to it than that, but you get it). You have to still be enrolled in school, and you’ll have to figure out how to survive in whatever location you desire – but you’ll have an unpaid internship ready for the taking.

I remember sitting in the classroom with two of my classmates, daydreaming about a PR internship in Barcelona or Chicago or New York. Big cities, far away places, and locations where I didn’t really have any connections yet. I had a few connections in New York that I was talking to, but nothing that was really leading to anything.

I started looking into options to make this opportunity financially possible. I was slated to graduate that summer, so there was no way for me to save up $8,000 in three months. I didn’t need any more school credit – so the opportunity was actually not all that great. OH AND IT WAS EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS.

So I went to the restaurant that night, bartended my face off, and continued to save for my trip down to Austin to SXSW. Which, ultimately, changed my life.

I seriously had no idea what I wanted to do after graduation – I just knew I wanted it to be big, and glamorous, and full of opportunities to learn and grow. The career path for a typical PR grad from USF is to go through the program, have a few internships, graduate, and go work for a non-profit or a local small agency if you’re lucky. The small agencies required internship experience – but to get that internship experience you had to have a flawless GPA. Which I didn’t have. So in the end, neither of those sounded like what I wanted to do. I was totally and completely open to any opportunity, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what I was looking for.

Until I got to Austin. The plan was to go to SXSW and come back with some new friends, a boat load of business cards, and some internship/job possibilities lined up for after graduation. In Austin, I had three informal interview-type situations.

Through all three conversations – I realized what my dreams were.

I talked to the president of a boutique agency who had offices in Milwaukee and Chicago. He told me that I didn’t have what it takes to make it in the agency world. But, he helped me with my resume and told me what agencies look for when they are considering candidates. So that was helpful.

I talked to a couple of guys from a creative agency in New York – which lead to big dreams and aspirations of working in a primarily digital and social environment. This company rocked my socks. It was my dream job. Digital work, big clients, challenging and fun atmosphere and OH EM GEE it’s in New York.

And then I talked to the guy who would eventually become my boss. That story is all over this blog, so I’ll spare you, but the point that I want to make is this:

You never know when you will discover your dreams. And you definitely don’t have to pay $8,000 to have the opportunity to do so.

Yes, SXSW was an investment. But it wasn’t $8,000. In fact, the internships that I found and held before I moved to Chicago for an internship with Weber Shandwick were all word of mouth. One of the girls in my classes was an intern at Moffitt and she loved it. So she gave me their contact information, I interviewed there and landed that one. Then there was a speaker who came to talk to our PRSSA chapter and after she was done speaking, I introduced myself, we had a moment that only KU fans can have together, and then we went our separate ways. Two months later, she needed an intern. Guess who she called?

You never know who will advocate for you. You never know who will find you interesting, who will see your promise, and who will invest time in your success. That being said, networking is single-handedly the most important thing you can do to get to where you want to be. And fortunately, networking comes in many shapes and sizes and most of the time is a minimal cost.

The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of amazing, talented, smart students out there. If you’re in college and reading this, you’re probably one of them. But being talented, amazing and eager to learn will only get you so far. You need to have someone behind you that knows this – that really believes in you – to be your champion and to get you in the door.

For more info on how to find an internship: read this. Then this.

Would you pay thousands of dollars for the opportunity to work through an unpaid internship? If you’re in college – how did you find your internships? If you’re out of college – how did you get your first job?

And to everyone – what are your dreams? Do you know what they are? Are you happy where you’re at? If not, what are you waiting for?

In February, I had the opportunity to participate in the All You Need series over at Ophelia’s Webb. It was a big fat lovey dovey month of daily posts from our community about what love is. And it was one of the hardest posts I have written so far. Not in the aspect that the concept of love is difficult for me to write about. It’s not. Obviously. When it comes to love, I’m all over it. I know what I want and what I need and what I have to offer and it’s all smiles and sparkles and unicorns and rainbows when it happens.

What was hard about this post in particular is that I was in this strange place when I wrote it. Not like dark-alley-strange, but strange like, in limbo. There was so much that could happen from the time it posted (February 15) until the time that I will further reference as “The Weekend”.

My post is below, but the post from the All You Need series that really rings true, especially after The Weekend is this one by Sharalyn Hartwell, a Generation Y columnist for the Examiner.

Here’s some food for thought:

Pretend your capacity for love is a beaker (like the ones you used in science class.) The water you pour into the beaker is the love you feel for a special someone. You may have a 500 mL beaker while he/she has a 250 mL beaker. Both are filled to the brim with water, holding (giving) all they can, but your beaker just happens to contain more water, simply because its capacity is much greater. As such, you have more love to give and you likely need more love to feel fulfilled.

I KNOW RIGHT!?!

Totally amazing, so simple, and definitely true!

So maybe my challenge now is not trying to figure out next steps or how it’s supposed to feel by any normal definition. If you know anything about this story, you know that it’s far from normal. Maybe the challenge now is all coming back to beakers. Which, given the context of my post below, is HILARIOUSLY ironic.

I think maybe now the challenge is for me to not only assess the compatibility of the beakers (not giving too much, not overflowing etc) but also to assess the capacity in which the beakers SHOULD be filled. And with what. Do I put the same kind of love in the beakers for my family as I do for my friends? Do I fill up the beaker for my best friend as high as I would if that best friend were my boyfriend?

So, my friends, in case you didn’t catch it, here is my guest post for the All You Need Series.

Love Happens For a Reason

I’ve known since I was a girl that the ultimate goal for this thing we call life is to be happy like my parents. That much has remained the same. As I grew up, I wanted to be an actress, a comedian, a lawyer, an athletic trainer, a surgeon. But there was always one constant that I have counted on in my equation of life while all of the other variables continue to change and shift and derail my plans.

Love.

I was almost a junior in college when I moved to Florida. I had decided that I was going to major in biology, go to med school, become an otolaryngologist (head and neck surgeon) and save lives for a living.

But then I met a guy.

Not even anyone special, in fact, he was the king of douchebaggery but you know, at the time, we were totally getting married someday. I found more value in hanging out with him than I did trying to figure out chemistry….

Read the rest over at Ophelia’s Webb.

So it really all does come back down to chemistry and science, doesn’t it?

They don’t tell you about this part. They don’t tell you about the part that rips the rug out from under you and the part that makes you question who you were or who you are.

This isn’t what you sign up for.

But this is part of it.

With any great risk there comes great reward. In this case, great risk was putting myself out there for all of it. In this case, the great risk was letting down a wall that was most definitely set in stone and concrete and sheet metal and rebar and any other reinforcing material. The risk this time was revisiting a story from the past. The risk this time was believing in something that hadn’t even had the chance to develop. The risk this time was really being me. And not apologizing. And not worrying about the scary shit.

And if I was given the chance, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I write this post without a single photo to document our time together. Not one snapshot to validate that he was actually here and that we actually took a stab at this. I write this post with only the visual and emotional context of this weekend, no physical proof that it actually happened.

But it did.

Life, like love, is a fickle, fickle bitch. You can plan and hope and predict and dream and wish until you’re blue in the face but at the end of the day, it is what it is. It is. Or it isn’t. And there isn’t a single damn thing I can do to change that.

I told my dad in January that this weekend would be life-changing. And it was.

I now have yet ANOTHER dimension to add to what I need. I have another bullet to add to what I have to offer. By all means, by any preset definiton, this should (could and would) be a total fail.

But it’s not.

We may not be redefining “epic” in the context that I THOUGHT we would, but I’d be an idiot to ignore what is happening.

So, I don’t know where things are headed, but I’m okay.