Education

samfordhall

 

Auburn University: Auburn Alabama
Bachelors of Arts; Public Relations and Spanish: expected to graduate August 2010

 

 

Major Courses

Here are the required courses public relations majors take. I chose to concentrate my degree in marketing and those classes, along with support electives are included.

  • Public Relations Campaigns
    • A capstone, or final, course designed to apply Public Relations and Communication principles to a campaign situation. Students work in groups and use the semester to complete a campaign for a community partner. These community partners are campus offices, businesses, non-profits or even cities and towns.

  • Ethics and Case Studies in Public Relations
    • Investigation and analysis of public relations problems through case studies. Students learn how different areas of public relations work by studying previous cases. The class covers topics such as crisis management, media relations, community relations, internal relations and more.

  • Style and Design in Public Relations Messages
    • An introduction to the use of style and design in public relations messages. Students are taught how to use different software to make blogs, newsletters and web pages by making them. Over 10 weeks students write 10 blog stories with video and develop their personal digital resume and portfolio Web page.

  • Survey and Research Methods
    • Students learn the basic research principles and about how survey research is used by mass media and public relations. The principles the students learn are applied in a final survey project and research analysis.

  • Communications in Organizations
    • Introduction to newswriting techniques, with emphasis on learning news values, recognizing parts of a story and writing stories that meet the standards of accuracy, grammar, style, spelling, law and ethics.

  • Arguementative Discourse
    • The examination of the critical tools necessary to evaluate arguments in current public discourse. Students learn how to analyze and dissect arguments to find its strengths and weaknesses.

  • Persuasive Discourse
    • Understanding and analyzing persuasive messages. Students study the theoretical approaches to attitude formation and change. Over the course they will develop skills to make critical evaluations of persuasive messages.

  • Promotion Strategy
    • An examination of the theory and use of promotional objectives, strategy and tactics in marketing. Students learn the optimal way to formulate budgets, goals and objectives and the division of labor in the marketing world.

  • Consumer Behavior
    • Analysis of the buying process as it is affected by environmental and institutional forces.