Teaching PR

In response to comments to a recent post, I polled my Campaigns class students to find out exactly how prepared they are in terms of PR skills. My unspoken assumption was that our students are generally very well prepared with both in-class and out-of-class experience (meaning jobs, internships, campus organizations, etc.).

I was right--and wrong.

Before I share the numbers, let me point out that 6 of the 28 who responded are second semester graduate students, most of whom were not PR majors as undergrads and therefore are not as well prepared as the 22 undergrads who are graduating in May. But that doesn't explain everything that I found.

First, the good news.

• Our students have lots of experience in writing news releases. Most have written 5-10 or more for classes (17 students), plus 1-4 (11 students) or 5-10 (10 students) outside of class. (Let's leave the "are news releases dead?" question aside for now).
• Eighteen report having at least one publication result from a news release--and two say they've had at least 10.
• Eighteen also report getting coverage for special event publicity.
• Ten have worked for the media (mostly the independent student newspaper, but also some radio, television, and magazine jobs/internships).
• Every student has written at least one news release and at least one survey questionnaire.

The unexpectedly (to me) bad news:

• Seven students have never pitched a reporter, for class or outside of class. 18 have pitched reporters for class projects, and 12 outside of class, but I was nonetheless very disappointed to find those seven--even if some of these are the grad students, a few of our undergrads are going to sneak out without pitching experience. Sorry, Todd Defren.
• In addition, 11 report never having moderated a focus group. Most have done one (8) or 2-3 (9 students). This one's complicated by the fact that one of my teams is doing theirs for their client later in the semester. But there are only seven students on that team, so once again a few are slipping through the cracks. When we reviewed our curriculum last spring we decided to split PR from the formerly joint ad/PR research class; hopefully this will give the PR faculty more ability to make sure everyone has done at least one.
• When I asked them to list "other" skills that they would highlight on their resumes, only four listed blogging. :-( So much for my blogging assignment!

Labels: education, public relations, students