Andrea Nowack is an intern at Waggener Edstrom in Portland, Oregon. A recent University of Oregon graduate, she was also the PRSSA chapter president and a member of the student-run PR agency, Allen Hall Public Relations. Her post will be offered in two parts. This is the first.
I graduated June 16 and started my first official PR job June 18… And I have my stellar education and extracurricular activities to thank for that, so when Kelli called on former students to write guest posts for her blog, I couldn’t say no!
A little bit about me… I graduated from the UO SOJC in June and began an internship with Waggener Edstrom Worldwide 2 days later. Talk about jumpstarting my career. But so far, I love it here! I work on the Microsoft Online Services Business, which deals mostly with MSN and Windows Live services (don’t be misled by the “Microsoft” title; it’s actually a consumer account ☺).
I work mostly on the OSB analyst relations team. And in case you are wondering what analyst relations is (trust me, I had no clue either before I started!), a PowerPoint slide I read today defines it as, “a form of public relations in which the use of detailed engagements is used to produce desirable and targeted outcomes.” Simply put, analysts are very similar to reporters but they write reports and blog posts as opposed to news articles, and they are often quoted by reporters as a credible source. (You can count that as your tech tip of the day!)
Working at a big agency is a lot of fun and it’s a great place to start out if you aren’t quite sure what type of PR you’re interested in. As an intern, I get to dip my feet into all kinds of things around the agency and help different people out with projects during my down time. For example, this week and last I got to help drive a Microsoft/ Nokia mobile announcement- definitely a challenging experience!
I toiled for hours trying to think of interesting topics to write about in this blog post, and then I asked myself, “hm, if I was a University student interested in studying PR, what would I want to hear about?” Oh wait, that was me less than two months ago! My how time flies…
Anyway, irrelevant comments aside, a question that I am often asked is, “how the heck did you land an agency job right out of college?” I’ll give you my top tips in the next post!
