Bring on the sports and the people!

by Scott Sauer

Public Relations.

What an interesting choice of major. It's such a vague term and can lead to very frustrating thought processes when contemplating life after OU. My internship with an event planning firm and a PR firm, inferno, quickly slammed the door with my passion for either of those routes. So now I am left with the "creating mutually beneficial relationships" road of PR.

Yeah OK.

This is my ultimate dream job, and my PR degree is gonna have to work.

I wanna throw t-shirts at sports games ... OK maybe not that simple, but I aspire to do promotional work for a sports team. And if that means I need to start out throwing t-shirts and running promotional events during halftime of a Memphis Grizzlies game, then so be it!

My love for sports has been growing since my Dad and I used to watch Cincinnati Bengal football games in our kitchen in Ohio when I was only 3 or 4. Dad and I loved the Bengals, and watching those games with him will be one of favorite memories I will always share with him.

That's who I want to impact. So much of PR at OU has been put in to research and campaigns, writing and publication. To me this is skewing our view of PR.

As PR people, we should thrive to understand people and how they interact with each other. We should thrive to impact the lives of everyone we work with in a positive way. It is important to keep this in mind as we begin to search for jobs.

I have come to terms with the idea that many of us are gonna be starting at the VERY bottom wherever we work. PR is going to be a tough field to find work in, but if we remember the reason we chose our major, the passion behind the degree, I think we will be all right.

We are very fortunate to have had the opportunity to earn our degree from the University of Oklahoma. Now it's time to take our spin on what we've learned and impact people in ways we would have never imagined were possible. Even if that means making them stand and scream ... all for an oversized t-shirt.