MY SECOND YEAR AS A PR & MEDIA STUDENT

Another year of university over, time is going way too fast. On May 6^th I submitted my final assignment of my second year of my PR and Media course. As I’m taking a placement year, I won’t be in formal university until autumn of 2017. I guess it’s time to dip my toe in to the grown up world but first let’s look back at my second year.

There’s a lot of talk about how much harder second year is than the first. It tends to go along the lines of ‘it’s all downhill from here’ or ‘it’s not a jump, it’s a bloody leap of faith’… I was prepared for a tougher year but for me it was in things happening alongside my degree where I felt the pinch. In terms of work and assignments I didn’t feel too differently about the difficulty. While I only needed 40% to pass my first year I was never the person who was happy to scrape by on the minimum so working so hard on assignments this year wasn’t such a shock. The fun doesn’t end with first year either; I’d say the common ability of a student to balance eight hour library stints and nights out only improves…

I’m talked about it so much but a source of stress throughout my second year was searching for placements. As much as placement searching was tough it was the perfect opportunity to work on employability and really focus on how to sell myself to employers. I am in no position to give advice on finding placements but something I will say is to take advantage of university careers advisers and events. I met with the department’s careers adviser a few times to finely tune my CV and Cover Letter and now I’m more confident when sending it to organisations. Things I’ve worked on through my second year have also made me so much prouder of my CV, I actually feel like I have gained experience that you so desperately need for PR and Media industries. And opportunities come from unexpected places. For example, my friend and I made a promo video and improved the social media profiles of a singing group after we were approached on the street by the group’s leader while recording vox pops. This led us to begin setting up our own production company.

Something that is equal parts scary and exciting from this year is how much I now lean towards the Media side of my degree. My course isn’t a joint honours, it’s a Public Relations course with some media modules that provide knowledge that would aid PR practices. This year I was allowed to choose some modules and the two that I chose were media focussed. I now consider myself much more of a Media student with PR rather than a PR student with Media. I have absolutely loved studying TV news and working with cameras and editing, something I once avoided (I really don’t why). I still enjoy PR and will get practical experience in it very soon but across my two years I have enjoyed media modules more and achieved higher grades.

When I handed in my finished my second year I felt very nostalgic, I’ve had another good year at university. Not to say that the year was all smooth sailing; living in a student house presented many challenges (*resists urge to rant about wheelie bins and messy housemates*), building employability has a way of both building and destroying confidence and I was poorly a lot. That aside, this year still managed to be pretty great.