A Day in the Life of a Public Relations Major

  Checking emails, your LinkedIn and Twitter every five minutes is part of your daily routine. If you’re a public relations major, this probably sounds familiar to you. It’s hard balancing the chaos of coffee meets, networking opportunity events and PRSSA meetings all in a week or even a day. On top of that, you have classes, manage social media accounts or write for a blog. It feels like you have 10 jobs sometimes, however, hopefully by now you’ve become quite used to it. Although this sounds stressful and overwhelming, there’s nothing PR majors enjoy more than being constantly busy. Here are some things PR majors can relate to and most likely do on the daily:

Check your emails 

Wake up and smell the...emails. For most people, the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is get up and make coffee. For us, checking emails is almost an automatic response and the first thing we do in the morning. Whether you’re waiting to hear back from an internship that you recently applied for or a new connection you just made, you never go too long without refreshing your mailbox.

You go to a media-related class 

It’s a week day and everyone else is stuck in an English, math or science class. You, on the other hand, are in any kind of journalism-related class. Your textbooks are about media, publicity, etc., and you actually ENJOY reading them. Studying for a quiz or test is no longer stressful when you have to memorize the ethics and responsibilities of a public relations professional.

You are constantly checking social media 

Let’s just say you’re never bored on your phone. Whether its your own account or an account you’re running for an organization, you are on social media 24/7 checking Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, blogs - the list goes on.

You know everyone 

Networking has become second nature for pre-PR professionals. Being a people person, you take this quality and often incorporate it into your social life by constantly meeting new people and making connections. Therefore, when you go out to any public place you pretty much always run into somebody you know. This can be either be really great or inconvenient, such as when you leave the house thinking, “I hope I don’t see anyone I know,” because you definitely will.

Sometimes it feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day to work on everything. Yet there’s no better feeling than getting in bed after a long day and feeling great about everything you’ve accomplished - until you remember that you forgot to do something of course. Being a PR major is both a rewarding and inspiring job. If you can relate to these, you’re definitely killing it in the field. Remember its important to take time for yourself and try not to stay up too late checking twitter because when you wake up, you get to start your routine all over again.

This post was written my Jamie Honowitz, a first-year public relations major at The University of Florida.