Taking Advantage of Opportunities – Public Relations Graduates

The term “content marketing” is a public relations strategy used to help search engines locate digital platforms that offer new and interesting information.  But, the term also refers to a strategy employed by me and another senior, Alyson Cohen, who took advantage of a number of partnership and project opportunities and proceeded to transform ourselves into, hopefully, a couple of highly marketable college graduates.

Thanks to a number of projects and partnerships during the spring semester, Alyson Cohen and I have now been able to fill our resumes with the type of quality content that we believe will separate us from the many hundreds of newly graduated PR students from universities around the New York Metropolitan area set to pour onto the streets of corporate America in search of communication jobs.  How’d we do it?  By taking advantage of every opportunity offered to us.  These include not just membership in the PRSSA, but also working on projects for – the New Jersey Advertising Club, Choose New Jersey, the United States Golf Association’s LPGA Open, Autism New Jersey, Columbia Bank, Celebrity Motor Car Company, and, certainly not least, the Metropolitan Opera Guild.

While the USGA example is still in progress, what we’ve done has the USGA (through its marketing arm, IMG) extremely excited.  It’s the creation of a promotional campaign to aide in ticket sales and publicity, and it’s driven by a promotion we created, entitled “Powered by She!”

Choose New Jersey is the high-powered state organization (with MSU President Susan Cole as one of its Board of Directors) that helps convince both national and multi-national corporations to expand operations into New Jersey.  We were part of the team that develop a strategic plan for the organization.

SCM has been working with the Metropolitan Opera Guild for more than four years, but when the opportunity arose to expand the scope of work the school does for the Met, again Alyson and I volunteered, and we created, along with other members of Sonja Bozic’s Transmedia Projects class, a new multi-platform storytelling techniques for the opera, “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

We also volunteered to help promote and coordinate the school’s sixth annual benefit for Autism New Jersey.  Similarly, we will be part of the production team for the New Jersey Advertising Club’s upcoming Jersey Awards Dinner in June.

Montclair State University has provided Alyson and me so many opportunities for advancement. Through the last two years, we have had the opportunity to work with various clients and be able to create media campaigns to meet their goals. We really enjoyed working with these clients, and we feel that it has helped us tremendously in preparing us for our future careers.

And, we did even more.  We also were involved in a research project for Columbia Bank, and helped publicize a special high school movie night promotion for the Celebrity Motor Car Company.

“I have had such an incredible time working with various companies to advanced their goals. This experience has been so unique and special to me. I really enjoyed working with my classmate, Hediyeh, in creating strategic campaigns for these companies. Montclair State University has an incredible communications program, and Hediyeh and I took the most advantage of all the opportunities that were offered,” Cohen stated.

Even though these projects kept both students extremely occupied, they did manage to find the time to complete their studies as cum laude graduates.