Recession? What recession?

When our country first entered a recession, nobody wanted to admit it.  Political candidates, the media, everyone nervously danced around the term. We all knew what was going on, but labeling it and saying it directly seemed like it could somehow make things worse.

Well, it’s all out in the open now. I can’t turn on a television, open a newspaper, even walk to class without seeing or hearing something about the economic state of our country. While I’m glad we’ve realized what’s going on and are trying to move forward, I’m getting really sick of the word recession.

Yes, I’m graduating in May. Yes, I realize this is a bad time for our economy.

No, I don’t have a job lined up. No, I’m not worried about it.

If I get one more sympathetic look from someone when I say I’m about to graduate, I may scream. Sure, times are tough, the job market is tight, blah blah blah, I’ve heard it all. I’ve heard it so much that it’s just starting to sound like a clichéd excuse.

Recent and upcoming graduates need to take control of their lives and, dare I say it, ignore the recession. Expand your search, put in more hours at that unpaid internship, do anything you can to set yourself apart and make yourself attractive to potential employers. The fact is, there are still jobs out there, landing them is just becoming more competitive. So instead of complaining about the economy, get out there and make things happen for yourselves. If you have a dream, follow it. Everything will work out in the end, because it has to – at least that’s my attitude for the upcoming months.

Epting: Day 2

I just got home from my second day at Epting, and I feel like I have more of a grip on how we're going to tackle our project.  It's kind of hard since there are actually five of us (I initially thought there would be three) working together on the style book project and not everyone is in the office at the same time, but once we get everything delegated I think it will run smoothly.

As I mentioned in my last post, we are re-designing the style books for weddings, and will probably eventually move on to other events.  We decided the best method to create the book would be to use Shutterfly, which allows you to digitally create your own scrapbooks and charges one flat rate to print the whole book.  This way all of the interns can access one account and we won't get caught up in software complications or anything like that.  We prepared a budget for the project, and got to work on discussing our thoughts for the book.  

We discussed categories and decided on seven broad wedding categories.  There are endless lists of wedding themes on blogs and in magazines, but we came up with: Traditional Elegance, Contemporary, Vintage, Romantic, Beach, Cultural Beauty, and Nature Inspired.  These will probably change before the final project is completed, but they were what we initially came up with.  Then we divided the themes into decor, lighting, furniture, table settings, and floral.  From here, we will be creating layouts and selecting pictures which fit into each of the themes and categories.  

We've certainly got our work cut out for us, but now that we have a work plan and budget I'm really excited to get started!  More updates to come...

First Day at Epting Events

So yesterday was my first day as an intern at Epting Events, and it was pretty much what I thought it would be - overwhelming!  First days are always scary, you're bombarded with so much information and meet so many people - there's no way to remember everything! 

The coolest part was definitely touring the building.  From the lobby, you would think it's just a small office with a few conference rooms for client meetings... this couldn't be farther from the truth.  Epting is unique in that they do almost everything in-house (they don't have to work with millions of vendors) - they have a floral department, catering, decorations, furniture & place settings - you name it, it's probably in their massive warehouse.  I could have easily spent hours walking around, looking at all of the cool lights, flowers, and decorations.  We also met other interns and event coordinators along the way, and everyone was super nice.  

Then we got to work on our main project.  I will be working with two other interns on re-organizing style books to show to clients.  This sounds like a small project, but it's really not. Our first part of the project will be wedding-specific, and then as time allows we will move on to other kinds of events.  Yesterday we spent hours going through wedding style books and magazines searching for inspiration for the books and making notes about different themes and seasons.  I'll admit it, I've never been one of those girls who dreamed about all the little details of her wedding... until now.  It's addictive! The flowers, the lights, the food, it's all so fun and extravagant!  I think I'll get to work on planning my wedding now... no, I don't have a boyfriend, but that's just a minor detail.

While this project will be my biggest focus, I will get to assist the event coordinators with anything they may need around the office.  I also plan to attend as many events as possible to see how the final products turn out.  Overall, I'm really excited about the experience and just can't wait to soak up as much information as possible about this industry.

Campaigns Class Assignment

Over the weekend, I was responsible for compiling the class responses (for my Campaigns class) to a very difficult question – what is a better word for “poverty”?

One of our clients' main goals is to come up with a better word for “poverty,” because they think it has the negative connotation of people who essentially should be blamed for their own bad situation in life.   The reality is that many of these people come from generations of poverty, and it’s really one big cycle that’s very hard to climb out of. 

*Click here for more details about our campaign.

My first reaction to this assignment was that no matter what word we come up with to replace poverty, it’s going to mean the same thing. Almost any synonym you can come up with has a negative stigma attached to it (I have a list of 53 from every online thesaurus possible).  I (and the majority of my classmates, according to everyone’s assignments) thought it would be a better approach to educate people about the true meaning of poverty.   As many students pointed out, it’s more effective (especially with kids in our generation) to be up-front about poverty rather than dance around the term and try to google euphemisms for it.

However, when we brought this up in class our professor told us we needed to respect what our clients want, which is a synonym for poverty with a better connotation. Our class is facing a difficult situation – where do you draw the line between what you personally think is best and what your client wants? Even though more than half of our class proposed an educational campaign to inform people about poverty, do we throw those ideas away because they go against our client’s wishes? Can we pitch these ideas to our clients, or would that offend them since they’re more familiar with the cause and clearly know what is best? Check back, I’ll keep updating on how our campaign is going.

Everyday Crises

Maybe it has to do with the crisis communication case studies I’ve looked at throughout my career as a PR major, but I’m a firm believer that any situation can be saved if it is handled appropriately. After two incidents this week, I’ve been thinking about how this can be applied to every day life, not just huge corporate disasters.

• First incident: I bartend downtown, and a few nights ago a friend left without paying his tab. Toward the end of the night I reminded him to pay it and he said he was coming right back… which he never did. Since we literally couldn’t close down the registers without having that tab paid, I called around 2 a.m. (when the bar closed) to see what was going on. He had already left downtown and had no recollection of even opening a tab. That’s fine, people get drunk and forget things, I get it. However, he proceeded to yell at me and call me mean names. I just assumed this was because he was drunk, but I got more angry texts the next day, accusing me of overreacting and blaming me for everything that had happened. Do I care if someone walks out on a tab? Not particularly. What bothered me was getting yelled at and blamed for something that wasn’t my fault.

• Second incident: Our neighbors asked if they could borrow our vacuum cleaner, which I of course agreed to (I should have known better when they followed the request with… “Ours is clogged and our floors are disgusting!”… but by then it was two late). They promised to bring it back as soon as they were done, but by the next afternoon we still had no vacuum cleaner. So I went over to see what was up and they ignored the doorbell. I could see all of their cars outside, not to mention hear them talking through the extremely thin walls of our duplex. After quite a few tries at the doorbell, some guy (that didn’t live there) finally came to the door looking confused so we just went in and took the vacuum cleaner back. Sure enough, when we tested it out it was broken. One of the girls ran over to explain (“we weren’t sure what to do, we were going to come over yesterday… but we never did”). Was I mad they had broken my $200 vacuum cleaner? Absolutely, but what I was more annoyed about was the fact that they apparently weren’t planning to do anything to fix the situation anytime soon. Had they come over as soon as it happened, explained, and apologized it would have been fine. 
  

Lessons in every day crisis communications: Take responsibility for your actions and apologize when you have done something wrong.

Aaaand that concludes my rant ☺

To Do: Get Butt to Gym

I like to think I do a pretty good job of balancing a lot of things in my life: 15 hours of classes, 2 part-time jobs, and the internship I'm about to start.  When asked recently in an interview how I stay organized, I thought for a minute before answering, "to do lists."  This seems like a really simple answer, but I honestly depend on to do lists.  If something is written in my planner, it somehow seems more important that I get it done.  

One of the things that always seems to fall through the cracks when I'm busy is working out.  But when I stop to think about it, I always do have time in the day to get to the gym, I just like to make excuses not to go.  Let's be honest, who likes going to the gym?  I'm fine once I'm there, but convincing myself to get up on put on my sneakers is a whole other story.  

So, with Spring Break right around the corner (kind of), I'm trying an experiment on myself.  Every week, I'm going to look at my planner and literally write down what time I should go work out.  I realize how silly it is that I get more motivated to do something just by writing down that I need to do it, but for the last week it has worked!  Check back in a month and a half to see if I'm still checking "gym" off my to do list...

New Internship

I'm starting a new internship Monday at Epting Events, and I couldn't be more excited!  I've always been interested in event planning, but I've never really gotten much experience in this area.  I wasn't planning on interning this semester but apparently I hate having any free time, and when this internship came along it seemed too cool to pass up.

There are a ton of interns and we're all working in different areas while still getting an overall understanding of the event planning industry and what Epting does exactly.  My specific project will be re-doing the style books and venue books.  I'm excited to apply what I learned in my Graphic Designs class a few years ago (which I loved), but I feel the need to point out why I got picked for this specific team.  

I love scrapbooking.

I'm serious!  In my interview we talked about the different teams and what areas there were for people to work in, and as soon as I saw the style books my eyes lit up.  I'm a scrapbooking nerd.  I have an entire bookshelf devoted to scrapbooks from vacations with friends, college years, family trips, etc.  Who knew this was such a marketable skill?  Maybe I should add "professional scrapbooker" to my resume...