How I Ended Up in PR

This post is #4 in my September Writing Project. Details are here.

Prompt: How did you end up in your current job/field?

I’m not someone who identified a chosen career at age eight and never changed my mind. I wanted to be a dancer, a dentist, a lawyer, an accountant, and probably 50 other things I can’t remember. Working in communications/PR was never on my radar.

I took an accounting course in high school and thought it was fine. I didn’t love it, but it was easy enough. I wanted to declare a major quickly in college to all but guarantee I’d graduate in four years or less, so accounting it was!

I realized quickly that accounting wasn’t the right field for me.

My grades were good, but that was due to my diligence as a student, not any passion for the subject. I talked to my advisor multiple times about changing my major and each time, he’d convince me that I hadn’t given the curriculum a fair shake yet. Eventually I was in too deep and switching majors would’ve push me into a fifth year of school. My scholarships only covered four years though and private college tuition wasn’t in the cards (or the bank account) for me as a 21-year-old.

(All was not lost though. I met my husband through that accounting program so I came out of it a winner.)

In my second year of school, I learned about a co-op program at a Fortune 50 company in Cincinnati. It was nerve-wracking, but I applied and was hired as a co-op on their recruiting team. When I graduated two years later, I was offered a full-time job on the same team and I accepted almost immediately.

I was excited about this job. It required a fair amount of travel, which was hugely appealing to me. I love to travel… but these weren’t relaxing, slow-speed trips. This was managing a team of 50 recruiters in a massive convention center. It was supervising a local union as they constructed our massive trade show booth. It was trying to schedule interviews on the spot for some students and trying to delicately explain to others why they weren’t going to get another chance.

Within a couple of years, I knew I wasn’t made to last in recruiting.

I could’ve kept at it, but my heart wasn’t ever going to be totally in it. I started trying to figure out my next move, knowing that I didn’t want to work in accounting and feeling like recruiting wasn’t quite right for me either.

I started taking on additional projects at work that were less tied to the day-to-day operations of our team. I joined our culture team and started mentoring current co-ops. I also joined a team that was creating a training curriculum for new recruiters. It was interesting work and fun to be in on the development. As we created training modules, I because the de-facto editor and proofreader. It was never a cemented part of the project, but I started reviewing everything we created, looking not just for grammatical errors but also ways to improve the clarity of the material. 

Shortly after that, the director running that project came to me with his year-end results letter to our organization and asked me to serve as his copy editor. That’s when I started realizing that this skill might make me unique. Not only that—I really enjoyed it.

I looked forward to editing anything I could get my hands on and my favorite projects were those that involved writing copy or helping someone else develop theirs. It was so much fun, but I was worried because I wasn’t sure I could find a job that allowed me to do those things while staying with my company (which was the goal).

Once I started looking at my options, I found a perfect opportunity in company communications/PR.

The job gave me the opportunity to write and edit for our internal news site and develop presentations for executives. After two years doing that, I spent a year launching my company’s official social media presence. Ater my first maternity leave, I came back to the same team but in a new role working with reporters as they write stories about the company and that’s where I am today.

I remember telling a friend years ago that PR/communications wasn’t the right field for me. Turns out I had no clue what I was talking about! I love this kind of work. No job is perfect and I definitely have days that leave me feeling depleted and low, but I’m a glass-half-full person and I can get past that. I work with some truly brilliant people and learn something new every day. I know how lucky I am to have found a type of work that’s fulfilling and fun.