Need experience to gain experience

Picture yourself walking into your dream job for an interview. Who wouldn’t want to hire a stud like yourself? You made the grades, led your school club as president and volunteered the last three summers in Kenya.

The interview goes smoothly. Before you leave the parking lot you update your status, “I should start my dream job right after graduation!!!”

A week or two passes and there is no call-back. Finally, after nearly four weeks you decide to call them. Their reply? “You were a great candidate, but we were really looking for someone with experience in the field.”


Ah, the dilemma. You can’t obtain a job without experience yet you can’t gain experience without a job. Many students graduate without any real experience but public relations is different. There are hundreds of public relations and communication internships in Oklahoma.

What is an internship? Internships are like a temporary part-time job with a business or organization related to your field of study. In public relations most internships are unpaid but it is possible to find a paid one, I’ve had both.

The key is to go out there and apply; besides most will let you earn college credit while interning.

(Check with your school internship advisor for more details. If you attend UCO or OCCC and would like more info, like whom to contact about public relations internships, give me a shout-out.)


I like to intern because it gives me the opportunity to obtain real world experience while letting me get my feet wet in different aspects of public relations. I’m learning that I prefer the event planning and community relations aspects of public relations.

Two great resources to follow are Greater Grads and PRSA-OKC. The first is a giant internship listing hosted by the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber. I’ll write, in future posts, more about all the awesome things they do. The second is a job listing which includes internships.


Inspiration: My first day at my internship, a la mode.

A letter to my future followers

Dear future followers,

My name is Jennifer and as part of an assignment in PR Methods, I am supposed to create a blog. So here I am. This blog will be the accumulation of the interesting articles I find relating to communication practices and my education on the run.

What exactly IS education on the run? Let me break it up into two parts, education and running. First is my education. I am a major in public relations and a double minor in both Spanish and leadership. I have been lucky enough to continually be in the right place at the right time and able to speak with several informational (and to me influential) people. However, luck is not everything and no matter how much luck I stumble on, I still have a great deal of learning to do.

Next is running. No, I’m not going to somehow blog while running, that would be some serious talent. Instead I use the word running as more of a metaphor for my hectic life. My roommate recently said, “You’re a like a self contained pinball going in a million different directions bouncing through three time dimensions” His statement couldn’t be more accurate nor would he be the first person to ask me if I have a twin or if I figured out how to clone myself.

I hope through this blog I will be able to share some informational tidbits while I travel along my educational path, speed bumps and all. If there is anything in particular you would like to know about me or communication please let me know because you are now a part of my education on the run.