This week instead of publishing my diary I asked PR student Bryony Chinnery to keep a record of hers and share it with us. These are her views and she’d like your feedback to help her continually learn and develop. So do please welcome this newcomer and share your thoughts with her, Rachel.
About me: My name is Bryony Chinnery, I am 21 years old and currently in my second year studying BA Hons Public Relations at the University of Greenwich in London. My passion for Public Relations stemmed from a background in media. I studied media at GCSE level – achieving my best grade in the subject I then took it to AS Level (a style of learning that didn’t suit me) then finally on to Btec Media in Print and Publishing at college.
While studying at college we learnt about all different areas of media and looked at areas such as advertising, events, marketing and PR. The more I looked into it, the more I wanted to do events, until I did some more research and realised that with PR I would be able to do events in the long run but have a much broader outlook of the whole field of media. I haven’t decided what my dream job would be yet but I am hoping that the further I get with my degree and work experience, the more insight I will have of this.
I’ve just started to write a blog (http://bryonysbubble.blogspot.com/) and I’m hoping it will help me to make contacts in the industry and also to receive feedback from other PR practitioners to develop my knowledge and understanding further. I would also like to hope that it will give an insight to current professionals so they can give feedback about the types of things we are learning, their relevance and other things we should look at.
Here is my week…
Monday 9 November
Today was really good, we had a guest speaker who enabled us to get a journalists’ point of view on how media relations works, but many of her thoughts and opinions contradict those that we learn in PR. She had a great breadth of experience though as she has been in the industry for so long and it really helped us to understand how the world of the journalist has changed over time.
Tuesday 10 November
We had another guest speaker at university today but I didn’t find it as useful as yesterday. She talked about the connections she has made and how she has now formed her own PR company. In my opinion through the descriptions of the jobs that she gave, she didn’t seem like much of a PR role model to me. Is a job doing only product placement really classed as PR? In my mind I’d see this more as an advertisers job? It definitely made me think about the different roles that are around and what PR actually means.
This evening I set up my blog and Twitter and am ready to play my part in the technological world of PR.
Wednesday 11 November
Think this was my favourite day of the course so far this year, we learnt really in depth about media analysis and some of the amazing technology that is available to help us evaluate success such as Google Insights and Monitter. Then had a Marketing lecturer covering our Understanding Stakeholders session. This gave us a really good perspective on attitudes and beliefs and how branding can fit into this. The day ended with a short presentation about consumer PR and another guest speaker, this time from the Metropolitan Police who gave an insight into how they deal with PR. She gave ‘Operation Rize’ as an example. It felt like an extremely productive day and I was left wanting to research more about everything I had learnt.
Friday 13 November
I keep getting emails from the business school placements office and it is making me wonder whether I should be taking a sandwich year and doing a yearlong placement? Do they give you a lot of benefits?
Do employers want you to have that sort of thing under your belt or are you better off doing smaller voluntary placements throughout the course. I really need industry professionals opinions on this one I think – what is your view? Should I go for short placements or a year long one?
Thanks Bryony for sharing your week with us. Feel free to leave comments for Bryony here or find her on Twitter @bryonychinnery. Are you working in PR or Communications? Would you like to share a diary of your week here? I’d love to hear from you, Rachel.
