UWW PR Alumni Speaks to Tactics 2 class

Yesterday recent UW-Whitewater graduate, Amy Paul, spoke to my PR Tactics 2 class. Paul graduated in May of 2011 with a degree in Public Relations. When she started at UWW in 2005 Paul was a Music major, but realized that music wasn’t really what she wanted to do so she tried business and finally landed on Public Relations. 

Currently, Paul works for the Milwaukee County Executives Office as a PR assistant. Some of her duties include managing the social media sites, writing press releases, monitoring media coverage, managing the website, writing constituent letters and planing major events. Recently, Paul was in charge of coordinating the 10th anniversary of 9.11. 

Paul attributes her success to the courses and professors at UW-Whitewater and the numerous internships that she had during her academic career. Paul asserts that there are certain classes that PR students must take such as strategies, electronic media copywriting, advertising, and photoshop in order to help them in the competitive job market. Her involvement in PRSSA is another thing made her stand out. Paul served as secretary, Insight editor, professional development chair, and regional activity coordinator. Some of Paul’s internships included Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, being the brand ambassador for the Qdoba Mexican Grill, working as the student assistant in event planning for the UWW University Development Office, and as the communications intern and street team member for the Milwaukee Admirals. While none of these internships were paid, Paul believes that each one was an excellent learning experience and its all about what you make of it. 

I asked Paul if there was anything else that she thinks that she should have done to better prepare her better for the real world. Her only recommendations were to start looking for internships earlier and join PRSSA earlier. 

Be sure to follow Paul on Twitter @AP2005 and to check out her online portfolio. 

The New and Improved PR Student

Welcome back everyone! I am so happy to be back at Whitewater and am looking forward to starting my junior year. Even though this is my third year here, this will only be my second semester as a PR student.

I spent most of my summer working at The Limited and interning for Barb Endl, the president of Tomorrow’s Hope. I spent most of my internship working on social media for the organization. I used tactics like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and YouTube. Before the summer started we had approximately eleven followers on Facebook. So I really had to brainstorm and come up with a way to get people aware that Tomorrow’s Hope is on Facebook. We started out by using Endl’s personal email and sending a request to like us on Facebook. This helped us gain our followers to about eighty. However, we still wanted more. So we started putting the Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and YouTube logos on all of the newspaper ads and PSA campaigns which ran on the radio stations. Our main promotion was going to be creating a Warhawk Tech Booth at Walk Fest, Ride with a Buddy, and Dirty Fit. We set up computers and a projection screen and went around and took pictures of the events. We then uploaded them to the Facebook site and displayed the pictures on the projector screen. We also had business cards printed and handed them out at the events. After the events our number of followers grew significantly and right now we have 193 followers.

I also had an opportunity to do a PSA for the events Walk Fest, Ride with a Buddy, and Dirty Fit. This was really cool because I had to learn how to condense everything important that we have been using in the press releases into just a thirty second PSA. It took me a few attempts to get it perfect but I think that everyone was really happy with the end result. Overall I had an amazing summer and an even more amazing experience working with Tomorrow’s Hope.