Well…this is my final blog post for the semester. Maybe I will continue to blog….maybe not. Over the past 15 weeks I have found that blogging wasn’t torturous when I had an idea to write about, but coming up with ideas was not always easy. Anyway, I can honestly say that Style and Design was one of the classes that I feel I have really learned skills that will be useful in the real world.
After working with a broken CD burner for four hours in lab this afternoon, and burning eight disks that didn’t work (for reasons unknown) I finally used a different computer and my online resume worked like a charm. I can’t wait to continue to make improvements on it and send it to potential employers. I feel certain that this knowledge will give me an edge over other job applicants.
It was a frustrating semester, but I made it through. Now that it is over I can appreciate everything I have learned.
Since our class conference call with Kami Huyse and Susan Getgood I have paid particular attention to situations involving women in PR and the rest of the working world. As a female aspiring to work in the male-dominated field of sports, I found the comments made by Keith Hernandez disgusting. If you are not familiar, Hernandez (NY Mets announcer) made comments about a woman being in the Padres’ dugout, and come to find out this woman was the team massage therapist.
Hernandez made a bad decision by commenting in the first place, and then dug an even bigger hole by making more comments later in the game. After realizing that his comments didn’t go over too well, he apologized. However, his apology, in my opinion, was worthless. He stated that IF he offended anyone he was sorry. So is he sorry for what he said or just sorry that anyone was offended? If you are going to make a public apology, make sure you are actually apologizing.
It is comments like these, and people like Hernandez that discredit women in any field. Sure during Hernandez’s playing days a woman in the dugout was unheard of, but that was quite a while ago. Things have changed, and Hernandez needs to wake up!
This past Wednesday the MSRT (mall survey research team) wrapped up the project with our presentation. I must say, I was not completely thrilled with our presentation, but given the time limit and each of the group members’ busy schedules, I think we did the best we could have.
As a result of this project I was exposed to a few new things that I know will help me in years to come. For starters, this was my first experience working with an actual client on anything of this nature. During my internship I worked with clients, but never from the start to finish of something. This was an excellent experience for each of us to have had, especially from a class. Another new experience (that I must admit I never thought would happen) was the use of a wiki to compile our final report. I said in an earlier post that I don’t think the wiki was used to its full potential, and might not have been the best route for our group, but regardless, I used a wiki.
I am obviously glad this project has reached its end, but looking back it was a good learning experience that will surely prove beneficial in the future.
This past Saturday was the Miss USA Pageant. I have watched this pageant since I can remember, and have also competed in the USA system in both Alabama and Texas. I am clearly a fan of the USA pageant system, but this year I found myself thinking the system was losing credibility. I realize times are always changing and that society has been moving toward the liberal side of things, but in my opinion the Miss USA Pageant has moved faster than society. One of this year’s hosts was Carson from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”. Carson made a few comments during the pageant that were quite colorful, and somewhat offending. It also seemed like there was also a lot more talk and hype about the swimsuit competition this year. If swimsuits aren’t enough, the evening gowns now have slits to the waist up the front of the dresses.
As a former ‘pageant girl’ this makes me cringe! Miss USA is supposed to be an example of what young girls should strive to become. I do not think some of these girls are the best role models for girls of the US. I don’t want to become or even compete for the title of Miss USA if it has come down to who wears the least amount of clothes! I have always stood by the fact that interview and on-stage questions make or break a contestant, but this year that didn’t seem to be the case. What happened to a beautiful, classy, well-spoken title holder? Mr. Trump seems to be concerned with the ratings, and after all…sex sells.
I have learned one very important lesson this week…with technology comes technical difficulties. As the semester ends, I have a final project in almost every class that I am rushing to finish. I am working with programs as advanced as InDesign, Flash and SnagIt and programs as common as Word and Excel. Ironically enough, in my many hours of working with InDesign I experience no problems or hang-ups, but experienced quite a few mishaps with a simple Excel Spreadsheet.
For a survey/research final report I was responsible for calculating the top ten requested stores for our mall survey. I entered the data, saved it, and e-mailed it to myself….only to find (a day later) that it didn’t save properly. I then had to spend another three hours recounting the number of times the stores were requested and re-enter the info into excel. Again, the document didn’t save in the right place (due in part to the way the University computers are set up). Fortunately, I was able to recover the second attempt and successfully finish that task.
Another technological issue I faced was involving Skype. For my style and design final project I have to use SnagIt to make a tutorial explaining the steps to using Skype. SnagIt was not the problem; instead it was the fact that the Skype sign-on was SO slow. Because the screen was being recorded there was a long pause in my tutorial while Skype attempted to connect. I tried this multiple times, but the speed of the log-in did not improve. I am going to give it another shot this afternoon and hope that Skype is moving a little faster.
A good lesson….allow plenty of time for technological mishaps! Fortunately I did this!
Throughout the semester I have written about my survey/research project and the steps of the process. We are now in the final stages and trying to wrap everything up because we present to our client (assuming she can make it) on Wednesday.
After our less than organized meeting last night I look back on everything and I don’t know what the rest of the group thought prior to the project, but my thoughts and expectations were incorrect. I expected that the hardest part was going to be the actual administration of the surveys. I always try to avoid people on campus or in the mall giving surveys and I assumed others would do the same, making it difficult to get 600 completed surveys. This turned out to be the easiest part. We were aggressive and were quickly able to reach our goal, and we did it in fewer days than we expected.
The past two weeks we have been working on the paper/report part of the project, and this has been difficult to organize. We decided to use a wiki (Robert was so proud) that would allow us to edit and add to the paper on our own time. The wiki seemed like a good idea, but after setting up two different wikis, I think many of us used Word instead.
Other than the disorganization the paper seems to be wrapping up nicely, with one minor pain in the butt… One of our questions asked respondents to list 3 stores they would like to see in the mall, and because there was no way for FormSite to calculate this question we had to do it by hand. After we divided up the calculating, Tyler and I typed our findings into a spreadsheet……however, the spreadsheet did not save properly and we lost the calculations. We started again today, recounting the listed stores. This was not crucial because we have the raw data; however it is a pain to recount 1,800 stores! SO…back to counting!
Every Tuesday new movies are available to rent on DVD, and every Tuesday (and Wednesday and Thursday) my boyfriend insists we rent one of the newest releases. This past week we watched “Fun with Dick and Jane”. I have to say that Jim Carey sometimes gets on my nerves so it wasn’t my top choice, but we rented it anyway. If you haven’t seen it I won’t ruin anything, but Jim Carey’s character ‘Dick’ is promoted to VP of Communications for a large company. Just as he was getting his promotion, I said something to the effect of ‘if I end up working in the corporate world I wouldn’t mind being VP of Communications’. It was funny because just after his promotion he gets the royal treatment from the big dogs in the company he is thrown in the middle of a huge company scandal. After seeing that, I thought twice about wanting that VP of Communications title.
Clearly this fictional company had poor internal communications because Dick had no idea anything was going on before he was thrown into the middle of it. I started thinking about actual companies that had similar scandals occur, and obviously Enron and WorldComm came to mind (there was also some fun poked at those companies throughout the movie). Sure this was a movie, but it’s pitiful to know that similar issues do exist in the real world. It was interesting to watch and critique how this company handled things, especially as a PR major.
I’m not a huge fan of licorice to begin with, but when Robert had a huge bucket of Red Vines Licorice in class I decided to try it. At first I smelled the licorice and it smelled like plastic…this didn’t get me too enthused about taking a bite out of the licorice, but I’ll try pretty much anything once. Robert prefaced my tasting by telling us that it was sugar free and fat free. He then corrected himself, because it does contain sugar. I was wondering how licorice would taste if it were sugar free, but fortunately I didn’t have to find out. I can’t imagine sugar free licorice would be delicious. My second thought was ‘isn’t all licorice fat free?’ If so, then I think this is a weak point in their marketing mix.
So, I have smelled it and visited the website…now to taste it…hold please…
It tastes like a cough medicine when you first bite into it, and as you chew it becomes powdery and flakey. I didn’t like that the middle was hollow either. You think you are biting into something thick, and then you find out it is only a hollow tube.
Like I mentioned earlier, I have never been a fan of licorice, and apparently Red Vines Licorice is not going to change that. On a positive note, the website is full of information and easy to navigate!
With only a few weeks left of class this semester we are starting to wrap up our survey research project. We managed to get nearly 600 people to take the survey which was our goal. It turned out to be much easier than I anticipated which was obviously nice. We did see our fair share of rejection, but because we had the coupons for free Chick-fil-a sandwiches people would usually take the survey.
We have transferred all the surveys into an electronic version of the survey on formsite, and this afternoon we will start reviewing the results.
As we have been going we have noted issues or problems that might have affected the results. I was surprised to see how many issues we ran into, despite all of our preparation and pre-testing. While we didn’t have any major hang-ups we did run in to quite a few minor issues. A few of the questions were unclear because students were putting their parents’ zip code rather than their auburn zip code, and were not sure if household income meant theirs or their parents. Also, many people did not want to disclose their household income. We decided to add in the choice of refusing to give household income because so many people were leaving it blank.
We also faced some issues with getting in touch with our client and the timeliness on her part. She was slow getting back to us and getting the supplies we requested. Fortunately we had allowed more time than we actually thought we would need, so while this was annoying it didn’t cause a major problems.
We present our final results next week, and I am interested to see what we came up with.
This past week our class had a Skype conference with Kami Huyse and Susan Getgood. The main topic(s) of discussion was the ‘Smurfette’ blog that was created a few weeks ago, and women in PR. During our conversation I started thinking about an MTV show from a few years or so ago called “PoweR Girls“. This show followed four attractive girls who were working for Lizzie Grubman’s PR firm, and was apparently a look into the “glamorous, sometimes stressful, but always exciting” world of PR and publicists.
This show must not have been too successful, because it only aired that one season. I can take a guess as to why it wasn’t successful… PR is an industry of mostly women and this show, and these four girls, made PR work look like a joke that any air-head can do.
First of all, the people who were most interested in watching this show were probably the people that this show pissed off the most. This portrayal of the PR industry is inaccurate and not only painted PR women in a negative light, but all PR professionals.
This show did nothing but further the misconceptions that PR is easy, fun and that women can use good looks and sex appeal to get the job done.
This topic is of particular interest to me, because I am a woman in PR, but more over because I want to work in sports (a male dominated field). I anticipate that at some point I will hear the ‘you’re too pretty’, ‘not pretty enough’ crap and will be treated as less of a professional because it is a male dominated field. This shouldn’t be a part of what I or any women should have to deal with, but until we (all PR practitioners) are able to put the misconceptions to rest this is a reality women in PR must face. With people like ’smurfette’ and shows like ‘PoweR Girls’ this could be a long fight!
