When I woke up Thursday morning, the idea of going back to school was not on my mind. In fact, it hasn’t been on my mind for, well, decades.
And yet a newsletter prompt took me to a link for the Public Relations Diploma program offered through UVic’s Continuing Studies — it’s delivered online; there are just 7 required courses plus 3 electives to complete the diploma; there isn’t a specific timeline and the cost seemed reasonable — so I threw in an application before my lunch break.
By the time I’d returned from lunch, I had been accepted.
It’s been a long time since I’ve taken any class for credit and I’m nervous about it all. I attempted some correspondence courses about 20 years ago and just couldn’t do it. I am hopeful that the online format within a term setting will mean more structure than the self-paced correspondence. Regardless, for the first term, I’ll likely enroll in just one course to see what the workload is like and how I manage it.
“But Cheryl,” you may be thinking, “I can’t recall you ever mentioning PR as a field that interested you…”
Yeah, probably not directly. But in the past five years, I’ve concentrated more of my skills growth in the area of communications — whether through social media or writing or other outreach — and my resume reflects that, as does the list of jobs for which I’ve applied (a mix, admittedly of communication and library jobs — my ultimate goal would be to combine the two). I’ve also been frustrated by being overlooked despite my skills and experience because I lack any kind of certification in the communication field; my hope is that this will close that gap.
So I guess I have the summer to slack off before I get back into student mode…
