Posted on:

September 3–September 30

40/135 hrs

I think the job search in general is always a little intimidating because 3 years of PR classes doesn’t really equate to “3+ years experience working in marketing or public relations.” Another thing I’ve been told as a public relations student is that I won’t get a job without any agency or firm experience—and in this particular economy, that is the last thing I really want to hear.

I think this is why one of my favourite things that Nicky has said to me since I started working in the Office of Marketing and Communications (hereby known as MarComm for brevity sake), was that we functioned as a private agency for the College of Arts and Humanities.  We have our own marketing, communications, social media, press and digital design element and put them all toward ARHU.

Of course, because we work as an agency, we work at an agency pace, which took a little getting used to.  One of my first tasks when I started with MarComm was copy-editing the bios of the new faculty cohort for the 2014–15 school year.  I went through it quickly being used to searching for AP style, having been a TA last semester.  I caught stray hyphenations, fact checked and changed journal titles from italics to quotes and then got in a huge back and forth with my supervisor on whether or not italics were AP style (they’re not!).  I finished the day feeling very accomplished because I had finished it in a timely manner and posted it to the website, only to be set back a couple of days because our second supervisor sent me a very blunt email pointing out “several errors that need to be fixed,” which then led to several back and forth emails between him, my supervisor and myself—all which led to them being disappointed in my work and my feeling very incompetent for the job ahead of me.

Of course, that was my first week, and I still had much to learn, including the fact that mistakes will be made and that we should always own up to them and double check our work so that mistakes will not happen again. (Nothing like a little expectancy violation theory to get your ball on the roll at work, right?)

As the undergraduate communications assistant, my job is to focus mainly on the comm and social media functionalities of our division as well as maintaining our website. This is particularly exciting because this position and the communications director, which succeeds it, are newly added positions to focus our engagement with other students.  When I think about it, it doesn’t seem like I’ve done too much, but in reality I actually have.  So far, I have done the following:

What’s nice about working on campus is that I see the results and outcomes of my work within a few days.  Or even the day of.

For example, this post of me walking around with a billboard on during the first look fair reached 284 and received 22 likes.  Now how awesome is that?

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