Crista’s Blog

So, I have finally found a place I would love to do my internship. It is the Kiawah Island Golf Resort. This resort is located right outside of Charleston, South Carolina. This place is gorgeous!! I have never been to Charleston, but I hear fantastic things about it. I am interested in this internship, not only because I love the location, but the experience it will provide me seems to be incredible. The golf resort has designed courses by Jack Nicklaus, Pete Dye, Gary Player. Their famous Ocean Course has held prestigious matches such as the 1991 Ryder Cup, the 1997 and 2003 World Cup and the 2004 Warburg Cup. This course is also where The Legend of Bagger Vance was filmed. The island itself also provides great shopping, dining and other activities.  All-around I think this would be an awesome place to gain an internship as well as a great experience.

Maybe you have heard about the latest blogging scandal in George Clooney’s life.  Apparently Clooney is not a blogging fan.  A celebrity blogger, Arianna Huffington, posted a blog entitled “George Clooney: I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It!” Huffington gathered her information on Clooney from sound bites from an interview he gave with Larry King and London’s Guardian. In her blog she talked about Clooney’s comments on the war in Iraq.  Well, this did not make the star too happy.  He lashed out at Huffington saying they were just answers to questions.  Clooney asked Huffington to put a disclaimer on her post, but she supposedly refused claiming it to be a “huge no-no in the blogosphere.” Huffington’s post on Clooney has been taken off her site.  She claims to have had permission from Clooney’s camp, but it turns out to be a huge misunderstanding.  I guess the blogging world has not won the heart of George Clooney! 

I have been giving some serious thought into going in to the political world. I would love to land an internship in Washington, D.C. I have visited there when I was younger and loved it, but I figure if I want to really get a foot in the door that’s probably the best place to be.  Well, lo and behold as I am considering my future, Thursday my Campaigns class had a meeting with an advisory council on the public relations curriculum here at Auburn.  One of the members of the concil lives in Washington and has been a press secretary, worked for trade association and worked with many senators.  After the meeting I spoke with him about my interest and he gave me his business card and told me to shoot him an email and he would help me in anyway he can to find an internship.  I was pumped!  It always helps to have connections, and I really hope he will be able to help me!

Sometimes when I’m sitting in class, all I can think about is, “I have no idea what I am doing.”  Does this thought run through anyone else’s head.  Public Relations is one of the most interesting and broad majors, but I am afraid I will forget everything I have been taught once I step into a job.  For instance, my worst nightmare is that an employer will ask me to write a press release, and all I will be able to say is, “huh?” The time to take the plunge into the “real world” is vastly approaching, and I am scared it’s going to be a rude awakening. I have taken some great classes taught by great professors, but what if it is not enough? Hopefully, public relations will be one of those things where you never fully grasp the concept until you are out there doing it.  Will someone ease my anxiety??

So, I may have found a breakthrough in what I would like to do with my life.  I have always had a fascination with politics and conspiracy, and recently I attended the Higher Education Day in Montgomery, Ala.  Higher Ed Day is a rally of schools from Alabama coming together to encourage others to vote and to be aware of bills about education.  We were able to sit in on a Senate meeting and have an indepth look in to the capitol.  This experienced further proved my love for politics. I think it would be exciting to do PR for political campaigns.  I enjoyed a post by Josh Hallet on how to have the perfect political campaign and appreciated his ideas and thoughts.  This career choice could be fun and exciting.  I am looking for internships that will run from August-December, and I would love to work at the Georgia Capitol or possibly somewhere in Washington, D.C. If anyone has any connections or advice, please let me know!

I believe I have previously posted about my capstone class PR Campaigns.  In this class we are working all semester long on a campaign for the Tampa Bay Auburn Club.  Today, we were doing research and working on finding some background information and the history of the alumni club.  I was in the archives section of the RBD library and called up to the reference desk to ask a question.  I was explaining to the reference lady what we were doing for our project and she began to tell me about a lady she knew from the Tampa area.  I gave the reference lady my information and asked her if she could get me in touch with this woman.  Lo and behold about 4 hours later I received a call from Connie Woods, who formerly lived in Tampa.  She answered several of my questions and gave me some great insight in to the Tampa Bay Auburn Club.  She even gave me some more names of people to get in touch with.  I thought this was such a random thing, but turned out to be such help.  It is truly a small world, and proves if you do a little research you can learn a lot.  I know this is quite a random post, but I thought it was an interesting story.

I am sure most of you have heard by now the scandal with Radio Shack, but let me refresh your memory.  Radio Shack CEO David Edmondson lied on his resume about receiving a psychology degree from Pacific Coast Baptist College in California.  In addition to not having a psychology degree, the school cannot even find any evidence Edmondson even attended. Edmondson has been CEO since May and no one has caught on to this resume flubs. How does this happen? Why did no one fully check this man’s credentials before hiring him to run a well-established, billion dollar company.  One would think where he went to school and his degree would be an important factor on how well he knows the business. Edmondson has apologized for what he calls “misstatements,” but does not seem to really agree that anything is wrong.  In an article he says,”I apologize to the board and the employees for the confusion I have created by carrying erroneous information on my resume and mishandling my explanation of it.” My question is what is his explanation.  Apparently it is a blatant lie, so what do you have to explain.  Austin Bay Blog writes about the incident, and I must say I am in agreement. How often does this happen in the business world?  Do people often falsify information on their resume and get away with it?  Are their men and women out there running Fortune 500 companies because their credentials are fake and no one has bothered to check on it? I would love to know if this is a regular occurrence and how many companies have run into this problem. 

Oops she did it again! I’m sorry, I could not resist! For anyone who thought the days of Britney Spears were over…you were wrong! She was photographed on Monday driving her car away from a coffee shop with her son in her lap. Spears was waiting in her car while her bodyguard ran in to grab her coffee.  She claimed she was being “hounded” by paparazzi and was prompted to pull away before strapping her son into his car seat.  Now what mother forgets to strap her child into a car seat and thinks it is ok just to drive with him right there.  Not your best move Britney.  Even if the paparazzi were surrounding and harassing her, one would think her motherly instinct would kick in and she would say, “Hey, let me turn around, protect my baby by safely placing him in his car seat and then I can drive away.”  Spears apologized and admitted what she did was wrong, but clearly blamed the entire situation on the paparazzi.  I have to say this borders on the incident where Michael Jackson held his baby over the railing of his hotel room, and that’s not a good thing to be compared to.

I was reading the plainsman Thursday, by the way I love reading the plainsman, and in was an article about podcasting.  Apparently, Apple has created an iTunesU, which is a new service based off of the iTunes, where professors can record or “podcast” their notes from class and students can then download them.  Students will be able to download the notes for free.  Stanford, Brown, Duke, Michigan, Wisconsin and Missouri have been chosen to be the pilot universities for the new service.  According to the article, some teachers at Auburn University are not thrilled about the idea.  They believe it will give students a reason not to come to class when they are allowed free access to the notes.  I agree with them.  Professors should be given the option of podcasting notes, but from a student’s perspective, I can honestly say I don’t know if I would attend class regularly if I knew all I had to do is download notes and play them on my iPod.  On the other hand, it would be nice to have a recorded version of the notes in case I missed something and needed to go back and have it explained.  There are definitely pros and cons to the new service of podcasting notes.  I’m interested to see how it effects the schools that will be testing it out. The article did say there is no knowledge of Auburn University requesting the service.

Recently at American Eagle we have had some manager changes.  One of our managers did not have a good relationship with the other manager and decided it was best for her to leave.  They were in the process of training a new woman to take the place of a previous manager who was taking time off because she was pregnant.  The manager who was pregnant came back right at the time the other manager was leaving.  The manager who left and the woman training were good friends, so the woman training was feeling some hostility toward the other two managers and she started gathering people on her side trying to turn others against the other managers. She began slacking off at work and did not do her job as well as she needed to.

            A manager had to be hired and so another woman was hired instead of the one who had been training.  It was obvious to the employees who knew how poorly the other manager was working and how angry she was at the managers why she was not chosen.  Well, her not being hired fueled her fire even more and now she is getting people to gang up on the other managers still.  There is a lot of hostility and anger among employees and managers.

            This situation could have been handled well if the managers would have sat everyone down and explained the situation to the employees instead of just announcing what was happening.  They could have set aside individual meetings with employees who had questions or did not understand why these decisions were made.  This is an example of bad employee relations.