Back when I was in college, I was trying to figure out how I was going to make a living.

 

I realize that for many people, figuring out how they would make a living after college was something they had figured out before they go to college, but this was the late 80s/early 90s and back then, you could major in 13th century French poetry and get a corporate job. At least you could when I started college.

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Anyhoo, I wanted to be a writer, but being a novelist was probably not going to pay my rent right away, so I was trying to figure out what to do in the meantime. One of my thoughts was to go into public relations. I took some classes from the communications department, and I even did an internship with a public relations firm through the English Literature Department, my major.

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During that internship, I learned how to put together a press kit using the press release skills I had learned in the communication department. I also learned how to raise money for a nonprofit. See, it was not only a public relations firm, it was also a development firm (fundraising for nonprofits). I wrote profiles on potential donors. I used the accounting skills I was learning in what would become my minor (Business Administration) to summarize the financials of foundations so that we could guess how much to ask for from those foundations.

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The things that I learned in that internship took me further than some classes I had taken in my liberal arts education. And I ended up using those skills in expected ways, like when I was in graduate school for psychology. I didn’t expect to need to know how to do a press kit as a graduate student in psychology, but being a research assistant sometimes requires you to do interesting (he-hum) tasks.