This semester, I took CM 331, the Advanced Writing for Communication course here at Boston University. As someone who has never been confident in her writing, I was happy to get more practice with it – but dreading actually having to do it.
The biggest project assigned for this class was called the ICC – the Integrated Communications Campaign. This project would span across the entirety of the class because it was made up of m a multitude of various parts to help prepare us for our future careers.
The first step of this project was to choose a company that we would be pretending to be a Public Relations professional for. We were given the ability to choose literally any company we wanted – as long as they were physically accessible to us. We had to be able to talk to them. I chose the Animal Rescue League of Boston because I already had interest in volunteering there (might as well spend time looking into it for a class then).
The assignments that make up the ICC are all things that a communications professional will likely need to know about because they will probably be doing the same exact thing in the future in an actual career. That was the coolest thing about this project – how applicable it will be. There are five assignments: Promotional Feature Article, Promotional Feature Pitch Letter, two Press Releases, and a Pitch to a Blogger.
My favorite part of this project was writing the press releases. Because we spent almost two entire class periods talking about writing them and then more time physically writing two of them, the exact format and tips for writing press releases are practically engrained in my brain. I can no longer look at a press release without noticing whether or not there are mistakes in it based on the way I learned how to write one.
Yes, we could have learned how to create each of these assignments without it being a large, semester-long project. However, I know I learned these things more accurately for a future career because of the way they were connected just as they would be while working for a company in the future.
By Calista Gray
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