What do you do?

I’m a senior in college, so I’m very familiar with a typical series of questions that starts with, “What are you going to school for?”

Although not entirely sound in grammar, the question is fairly easy to answer: Public Relations.

The following question is a little more difficult. “What exactly is public relations?”

As much as I try to sterilize the field to a point that I can explain it to people, especially people who don’t grow with technology, I feel that they don’t really grasp what I want to do.

My marketing professor told us that he has two definitions for his career, the cocktail party one and the long boring one. So maybe my overly simplified, short answer will suffice as my cocktail party definition. When I know that I really have someone’s attention and they actually care about what I’m studying then I can define it and I think that sort of person will also notice the passion for the field in my explanation.

The next question they ask is, “Where can you work with a degree in that?”

They noticeably leave out “public relations” because they have most likely forgotten my answer to question #1. I think one of the best things about PR is that it is a really versatile field. There are PR people in agencies, corporations, nonprofits, government, educational institutions and medical providers (did I leave anything out?).