Tara Seymour is a public relations senior at the University of South Florida. She specializes in creative thinking and promotional development and thrives in seeking new innovative ways to create a brand. She is an active member of PRSSA and PRSA, and is an intern at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, FL.

Standing out in the public relations world is nothing less than an up-hill climb. As a graduating senior at the University of South Florida, I have witnessed the competitive nature of PR students. Everyone wants to become the best—that one student to become the legend of their school. Unfortunately, there is not enough room for every student to become a PR legend. However, I am convinced that with hard work and devotion every PR student can find their place in this career.

Finding your place in this career takes time. It is not something that can happen overnight, in fact, it takes years to develop. I found my place in public relations through my ambition. My ambition has taken me to places I never imagined I could go, and it has opened my life up to a whole new world of opportunities. Two years ago, when I was beginning my journey in mass communications, I was driven, but I was unprepared for what the real world had in store for me. It took a real life experience to prove to me that I needed to work harder to get to where I wanted to be.

In December of 2007, I had an internship opportunity at HARPO studios in Chicago. To land this internship I had to go through my first real interview. A panel of HARPO employees interviewed me for nearly five hours. It was a great experience, but it scared me to death. My lack of experience was evident, and I didn’t have the skills to back up my interest. That day I realized how competitive this world is, and how much work I needed to do to get the job I wanted.

When I got home, I put 100 percent devotion into my future. I wanted to learn everything, get experience and grow as a student and future professional. I did research on career options, I dived into job searches, I practiced my interview skills and I invested time in career centers. It became a full-time job preparing for my future career, and it still is today.

The feeling of not being prepared or experienced gave me the motivation and final push I needed to jump into public relations. I spent all my spare time interning and learning about mass communications. But, I still struggled to find my niche in PR. I took full advantage of my mentor and the professors who were willing to guide me in the right direction.

They were incredibly helpful, and I would not be where I am today without their help. My mentor provided me with insight, suggestions and future internship opportunities. She was not only supportive, but she also introduced me to many professionals in the media workplace that I now network with today.

Even with the help of my mentor and professors, it still took me five different internships to figure out what I wanted to do in public relations. It was challenging, but all the hard work has paid off. I have walked away from every experience with valuable tools and new lessons learned that I will take away with me for the rest of my life. Finding a niche and a place in PR takes time, but with ambition and hard work anyone can get there with the right attitude and determination.

“You have to figure out who you are—and are you going to be true to that?” – Mona Pasquil, vice president of MSHC Partners, Inc. and business development consultant and sales strategist for IBM. Keynote speaker at the 2009 PRSSA National Conference in San Diego.

Tara Seymour

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Picture Credit: Taken by Cherisse Fonseca Rivera

Monica Lynn is a senior public relations student at the USF School of Mass Communications. She is currently an intern at French West Vaughan in Tampa. She is a member of USF PRSSA and is the marketing chair for the non profit organization, Hooked on Hope.

Learning about public relations inside and outside the classroom has been a winding river full of lots and lots of rapids this semester. I felt like I was up a stream without a paddle most of the way.

I am a first semester senior studying mass communications at the University of South Florida. I began taking mass communications classes a year ago, yet I feel like it has been a thousand light years since then. I have come full circle from thinking I picked a sort of easy major because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, to wanting to be the head of a PR agency in t-minus 10 years. Whoa, how did that happen?

If I have ever had a moment where I felt like I was the most ill-prepared person on the face of the Earth for a specific task or goal, it was the first day of this semester. I can not even recall the amount of times I heard the three terms ‘social media’, ‘Twitter’ and ‘blog’ that first day and every day after for that matter. Before this semester I thought Twitter was a complete joke and basically for people that had nothing better to do than to tell all of their followers when they were going to the gym. Blogs, I figured, were for people that had way too much to say and just wanted an outlet to vent. I considered social media in general to be a fairly big deal, but I didn’t see why that mattered in public relations.

Needless to say, my thinking was quite flawed. Literally, the first night of this semester, I was completely overwhelmed. I went home dazed and confused, but I still created a blog, Twitter and LinkedIn account. My professors kept reiterating the fact that students are the young ones and majority of the time they are the ones who are expected to know how to do social media for whatever agency or company they work for. So, basically if we weren’t already engaged in social media, as in more than just having a Facebook account, we needed to quickly do just that. Over the course of this semester I have come to the realization that social media isn’t kind of a big deal, it is THE deal in a lot of instances. It has, and still is, single-handedly changing the way businesses do business. It is as simple as that.

Today, I can’t be more grateful that even though USF doesn’t offer any social media classes, my professors still gave us a huge dose of social media every day in class. This braced me for my internship experiences.

A few weeks into my internship, my company started moving forward with an aggressive social media strategy to build the agency’s presence on the Web. I have had the opportunity to be a part of it, and make suggestions a long the way. It has been an enlightening semester, and has opened my eyes to the opportunities social media presents within public relations.

At my office, I was actually called the “social media guru” the other day. I truly had a moment when I read those words in an e-mail sent by one of the account coordinators. I think I realized more quickly that social media was the “it” topic right now, and I seized the occasion. Now, social media has, in a way, set me apart from all the other interns.

I fully plan on continuing my knowledge of the “groundswell” that social media has been termed. It needs to be an integral part of pr campaigns from here on out, and I want to be ahead of that curve and not trying to paddle up stream again with no paddle

There are so many ways to define public relations.  I read numerous blogs lately trying to ask the question that never dies, what exactly does pr mean?  Today, I get the privilege to talk about what is public relations with my pr writing students. It made me start thinking about what I love about the industry.  Then I realized I define public relations by what I love.

I love public relations because it is about people.  The phrase “the publics it serves” melts my heart.  PR is a servant job that deals with an organizations internal and external publics.  No matter what your role is within the industry, you represent people’s needs, wants, desires, and dreams.  My clients depend on me to help them achieve a vision for their organizations. In turn, I serve them by counseling them, building relationships, and implementing plans to achieve organizational goals. 

I love that public relations is about community.  I am reminded daily, that without those around me I am not successful.  I need input from my peers.  I crave the approval of my colleagues.  I learn more from my “students” then they learn from me because I well aware that without them I become stagnant.  I recently read a blog by Chris Brogan on community.  These words made by Brogan made me shake, “But oh, the people who live for community, the ones who know that the human-shaped web is much more powerful in the longer run than any technology out there today, those are the ones to watch. If you run across someone who feels that strongly about community, and who knows what to do with those feelings (because remember: execution is everything), make friends, build a relationship at once, and work forward into what you can do together.”  This is who I want to be!  I hope that I inspire those around me to be the same.

I love public relations because it is about two-way communication.  I hate to hear myself talk, but I love people’s input and ideas.  I love that I can bring a thought, or an inspiration, to the table and those around me can take off with it.  I like having the confidence within myself to let others talk.  Public relations allows respect.  Something which others outside of pr might find arguable.

I think you can not define what you do until you know what you love about it.  How about you, what do you love about what you do?  If you work in public relations, what do you love about it?