Zombie Nation: PR students gone mindless.

I can’t help but wonder how my fellow peers are gaining any insight into public relations from recent guest speakers. I mean no harm by this post, but COME ON guys! Can’t anyone ask a question with some depth behind it?

Week after week we are given the opportunity to hear a guest speaker talk about their endeavors as a PR practitioner.  I gain a lot of knowledge from their experiences and even end up re-evaluating if PR is the right choice for me.  I spend most of my time listening to the guest speaker and, because of my lack of knowledge on the practice of PR, I am hesitant to ask any questions (wrong I know).  However, if I think of something with sustenance, I find their email and send them my question.  Because I am not sure if PR will be my future venture, I take each guest speakers’ story and try and relate it to my own.  However, I can’t help but wonder what others in my class are gaining for the insight being laid upon them from these speakers. 

Let me describe the typical guest speaker experience in my classroom:

• First of all, the guest speaker goes on about how experienced he or she is, which ends up making me feel like the size of a pea.  It is quiet amazing what some of these people accomplish and it is very inspirational for hopeful PR professionals. 
• They continue by giving some helpful tips on how we should be spending our time in college to prepare for the “real world”.  I take most of my understanding from the information given here. 
• Finally, the speaker asks the class if they have any questions.  Like I mentioned before, I can never come up with any clever questions, and if I did later on, I would email them. Although, I wish I could come up with something just for the sake of sanity for these speakers, as the questions being asked are almost insulting to the speakers experience and time they have given to speak to our class. 

Typical questions asked are along the lines of:

• “How should my resume look?” 
• “What do you look for in an interview?” 
• “Should I include this or that on my resume?”

 All these structural questions are important at some point in our college career, but not necessary as of now.  We are there to learn about the practice of public relations, not how to get a job.  This is not a seminar or work shop on resume building.  If I were a PR professional and spent my day speaking to a class, I would find these questions irrelevant, unless I bring up how to structure a resume and how to excel in getting the perfect PR job. On the other hand, I want to give credit to those that do ask sensible questions that merit an answer (which is more than I can say for myself).  There are a handful of students that understand what they are talking about, and ask appropriate questions that go along the lines of what the speaker is saying.  Yet I am still baffled by the mindless, almost zombie state that most students are in… I feel like there is more to what these speakers have to offer, and my peers are already worried about how they are being perceived in the industry rather than learning the industry itself.

I understand that we are all still learning the tricks and trades of PR and want to gain as much information as we can, but I think learning how to construct our resumes or how to present ourselves for a job interview that we know very little about at this time in our college career, as we are still just learning the basics, is the wrong way to go when given the chance to speak with a PR professional.

As Batchelor stated in class today… GET CREATIVE!

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