In my first year of college, I had a class
on Public Relations where my teacher announced PR is Pyaar (love). A few months later, we studied what PR actually was and I never truly understood it
until I was neck in deep in the industry. Now I know PR is not remotely related
to love. It isn’t, it isn’t. So here’s a list of what I have learnt so far
about the industry in the past one year.
Pros
1. It’s good money. I wouldn’t get paid as much in a newspaper or a
magazine.
2. You get a chance to learn, a lot! That’s the thing about reading newspapers
every day and meeting journalists and clients. As my boss tells me, you should
know something about everything so you can have conversations with intellectuals,
be at par with them, which brings me to my third point.
3. You get to meet really interesting, intelligent and brilliant
people. These include businessmen, journalists, artists and innovators. Some
could really inspire you.
4. Then there are those occasional parties, celebrity events and the
fun part. You won’t find any BFFs in celebrities but there’s glamour in PR too.
Not really a party hopper but who doesn’t want to meet SRK?
5. You have to be a jack of all
trades whether it is designing invites, managing digital media, making
strategies or marketing plans, among other things.
Cons
1.
Journalists hate you, they will
never respect you. They will dodge your calls, refuse to come out of their
offices to meet you and pretend you don’t exist. Why? Because they can.
2.
There’s no ‘I’ in PR. You will
never get credit for anything you do. Deal with it!
3.
Your client will never be happy
because they have unrealistic expectations and don’t understand how media works.
Get his quotes on the front page and he will still complain that his photo didn’t
appear.
4.
Try as you may, you can’t explain
to your family what you do.
5.
Submissive. Subservient. You are expected to bow every time, regardless
to who it is on the other side – journalist, client or your boss.
PR is not something you can learn in a
class, I know now. There’s only so much a teacher can teach. Of course, writing
and communication skills are important but when you have to think on your feet,
that’s something you grasp when you sink your teeth into it.
Is PR for me? Well, I’m still trying to
figure it out sitting by the fences.
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