CHANGING YOUR PATH
Key Insight 3
“Do what you have to do, in order to do what you want to do.” This quote by Denzel Washington summarizes the logic I used to decide to go against sticking to what I was passionate about as demonstrated in my second key insight in deciding what type of job I wanted to pursue for after graduation. My third key insight developed as I progressed through my internship at Colonial Life and realized my undergraduate education would not be enough as I became searching for and applying for jobs that appealed to me that were completely outside of the realm of work I am passionate about.
As a senior public relations major, you are required to take Jour 533 Public Relations Management. In this course, you focus on the importance of the communications team within an organization having a direct line to senior management. As a person in this position, it is your job to educate the senior team on ethics and values and to develop a strategic plan to effectively communicate with the organization's key publics. This knowledge can best be demonstrated through my final project on the Wells Fargo bank scandal. The biggest takeaway from this course was the importance of business acumen, the ability to speak and understand the language of business. What I came to realize was that as a public relations major in the journalism school, this is something you do not learn. The only required business course is Principles of Management and while that gave me basic knowledge of goal setting and organizational structures, in my internship I struggled to keep up with the language of everyday business.
As I began my job search, I came to realize that if I stuck to what I was comfortable with, that being communications, I would not be able to develop as a business professional. So, I took a risk and applied for a professional development program that would allow me rotate through different areas of Unum, a financial protection benefits company, to learn the business more effectively. At the end of the program, I would have been placed in a people manager leadership position. While I did make it to the final round of interviews, which took me to Chattanooga, T.N. for a two day, four part interview process that included a presentation on change management, I was not able to successfully apply business principles to different case studies during the interviews and was not offered a position. However, they did see value in my leadership experience and my ability to learn quickly and offered me a different job within the company. My hope is that fully emerging myself in a position focused on business and insurance will give me the skills I need to learn and develop as a professional outside of the realm of communications.
As a result of my experience in my management course followed by my post-graduate job search, I realized that being a well-rounded individual in the workforce is a crucial part of finding future success. While I may return to the field of communications later on in my career, right now it is more important to expand my knowledge of the industry I would like to work in as a whole. If I return to the field of communications, I am confident that I will have done what I needed to do to be a more well-informed and knowledgeable employee who is able to develop communications on a broader range of topics related to the industry as a result of this decision.