Monica Lynn is a senior public relations student at the USF School of Mass Communications. She is currently an intern at French West Vaughan in Tampa. She is a member of USF PRSSA and is the marketing chair for the non profit organization, Hooked on Hope.

Learning about public relations inside and outside the classroom has been a winding river full of lots and lots of rapids this semester. I felt like I was up a stream without a paddle most of the way.

I am a first semester senior studying mass communications at the University of South Florida. I began taking mass communications classes a year ago, yet I feel like it has been a thousand light years since then. I have come full circle from thinking I picked a sort of easy major because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, to wanting to be the head of a PR agency in t-minus 10 years. Whoa, how did that happen?

If I have ever had a moment where I felt like I was the most ill-prepared person on the face of the Earth for a specific task or goal, it was the first day of this semester. I can not even recall the amount of times I heard the three terms ‘social media’, ‘Twitter’ and ‘blog’ that first day and every day after for that matter. Before this semester I thought Twitter was a complete joke and basically for people that had nothing better to do than to tell all of their followers when they were going to the gym. Blogs, I figured, were for people that had way too much to say and just wanted an outlet to vent. I considered social media in general to be a fairly big deal, but I didn’t see why that mattered in public relations.

Needless to say, my thinking was quite flawed. Literally, the first night of this semester, I was completely overwhelmed. I went home dazed and confused, but I still created a blog, Twitter and LinkedIn account. My professors kept reiterating the fact that students are the young ones and majority of the time they are the ones who are expected to know how to do social media for whatever agency or company they work for. So, basically if we weren’t already engaged in social media, as in more than just having a Facebook account, we needed to quickly do just that. Over the course of this semester I have come to the realization that social media isn’t kind of a big deal, it is THE deal in a lot of instances. It has, and still is, single-handedly changing the way businesses do business. It is as simple as that.

Today, I can’t be more grateful that even though USF doesn’t offer any social media classes, my professors still gave us a huge dose of social media every day in class. This braced me for my internship experiences.

A few weeks into my internship, my company started moving forward with an aggressive social media strategy to build the agency’s presence on the Web. I have had the opportunity to be a part of it, and make suggestions a long the way. It has been an enlightening semester, and has opened my eyes to the opportunities social media presents within public relations.

At my office, I was actually called the “social media guru” the other day. I truly had a moment when I read those words in an e-mail sent by one of the account coordinators. I think I realized more quickly that social media was the “it” topic right now, and I seized the occasion. Now, social media has, in a way, set me apart from all the other interns.

I fully plan on continuing my knowledge of the “groundswell” that social media has been termed. It needs to be an integral part of pr campaigns from here on out, and I want to be ahead of that curve and not trying to paddle up stream again with no paddle