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A New Chapter: Public Relations & Corporate Communications
I'm back in school as a full-time student studying communications.
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Time flies—just three months ago, I was speaking to alumni and academic coordinators at public relations programs in Toronto; and now I am three weeks into the Public Relations and Corporate Communications program at Seneca Polytechnic College.
A career in communications manifested by accident after years working in data visualization. In 2020, I felt done with making dataviz and knew it was time to do something else. Maybe I was tired, or needed a change…then the Data Visualization Society (DVS) posted a communications role on their LinkedIn. I applied and got it. I met the basic requirements to do the job, but I quickly learned that I had many areas of improvement, which included writing and marketing analytics.
After three years at the DVS as the Communications Manager, it was time for a new challenge. So I turned to formal education. Learning all the necessary skills by myself to succeed in communications was tedious and complex. Navigating online resources and evaluating credibility was difficult. So an eight-month program at a local college made sense for at this point of my career.
The first week was amazing. My professors were all seasoned experts in this field with boundless enthusiasm for teaching and equipped with a backlog of industry stories to share with us. The students were equally engaged; they ask many questions and participate in all class discussions. Surprisingly, we all come from different points in the career cycle. Many just finished a degree and are looking to gain more practical skills. Others have worked for a few years and want to broader their opportunities. Our classroom discussions have been enriched by the wide of range experiences students bring with them. Everyone is committed, and I am so grateful to my cohort of classmates.
Old rules, new tools
The last time I attended school was in 2011. It was a very different time. Notion, a tool I rely on daily to manage my time, was invented in 2013—two years after I started my bachelor studies. Today, I cannot live without Notion, for work or personal planning. At school, I created a calendar of our deadlines and circulated it with my classmates.
School is just getting started and we already had things due 😭
Sometimes, I feel like I’m out of the loop. I’m a bit older than other students and I use different tools. Many of them are on TikTok, while I still prefer to watch long form videos on YouTube. Someone even asked me for my Instagram handle, which has been inactive.
Despite the changes in recent times, my digital media professor gave me some comfort with this: “old rules, new tools.” We discussed how communications has been re-imagined: the smartphone and landline, Wikipedia and encyclopedias, newspapers and X, and so on. I feel better knowing that nothing has actually changed. It may look like that on the surface, but it’s not foreign.
Discovering new possibilities
My favourite class to attend is internal communications. This field aims to help team members exchange information and increase productivity. And I love improving productivity (it should be obvious since I love Notion). Our first assignment was to examine what an internal communications policy looked like and explore its importance. To my surprise, I loved this assignment. Time passed effortlessly as I completed it.
I never would’ve thought that I’d discover a newfound passion! It’s exciting to think that I could help teams advocate for a workplace they want to be in and improve systems for knowledge exchange. I’ve taken a lot of initiative at DVS to support documentation of processes and know I have a knack for it.
Internal communications is like community management, except it’s not public. Community has been the success factor at DVS. People join for the community: to meet, exchange ideas, and learn from others. Lately, the job market has been tough for community managers. It’s a nascent field and impact evaluation isn’t straightforward. But internal comms has been around for so long and it’s filled with many opportunities. I’ve always loved community management and discovering that I could apply many of the same skills and thinking to internal comms excites me.
