What do you say when a group of enthusiastic communications students ask if they can come to your office to learn about the life of a real PR person? You say, “Sure thing.” And you hope the visit doesn’t take up too much time. We were excited when we opened the door to 25 West Chester University students from the Public Relations Student Society of America. So we took them upstairs to the president’s office and invited them to spread out.

We had never entertained so many people in that space before. They sat on the chairs. They sat on the floor. And they stood wherever they could find a space. We asked them to tell us a bit about themselves and what they wanted to learn from this visit.

We discussed some of the projects Breslow Partners has worked on. We discussed the industry in general. They wanted to know what a normal day was like. That was hard to say because no two days are even the same. So we talked about the industry in general and specifically how it has changed. We asked them how they get their news. No one read the daily newspapers, they all get their news from Twitter. We told them that good PR people have to read the news, follow reporters, and how being a news junkie is important to being a good PR professional.And we spoke about our hiring process and what we look for when bringing in someone new.  And this visit offered us the perfect opportunity to pitch them on our very popular six-month PR Boot Camp, an intensive training program that offers participants an opportunity to work as account managers. One look and we knew that we had influenced these future leaders. We could tell there was more than one rising star publicist in the group.

We look forward to a day when our professional paths cross. We believe there will always be a place for traditional PR, but as we watch the ways in which social media has influenced the world, we look forward to learning more from this new crop of soon to be college graduates. We’ll be happy to trade them what we know about traditional PR for their insight into social media. Just like so many other industries, PR has changed so much in recent years. We believe there will always be a place for traditional PR, but we cherish the idea of learning about new public relations practices from young, highly motivated and passionate social media experts.

When they left, we heard them saying, “That’s the type of place I want to work at when I intern or graduate!” We had no idea we would have such fun. Breslow Partner’s extensive six-month boot camp provides students with the competitive edge to beat out the competition. Please send resumes or inquiries to tina@breslowpartners.com.