By Erin Wilgenbusch, Greenlee associate teaching professor
“Organized,” “Hardworking,” “Intelligent,” “Passionate” and “Outgoing”. If these words describe you, then you’d be a great fit for the Greenlee School public relations degree.
Brand Storytelling (PR 324X) is a new course offered by Greenlee this spring. Students in this class study the way brands tell stories and go through the process of developing a brand story for a client.
As part of this class, students also explore and develop their personal brand story, a helpful tool when writing resumes and cover letters, giving an “elevator pitch” at a career fair, or preparing their LinkedIn profile.
The exercise develops as students conduct a gap analysis, comparing how they describe themselves with the way other people in their lives describe them. The students then create a word cloud to highlight the words that others use to describe them the most frequently. They compare their personal list of words to what they see in the word cloud. This analysis helps students to identify and begin analyzing the “gap” between how they see themselves and how others see them. The first step in developing a brand story.
Students compared their word clouds and gap analyses with others in their peer group (public relations students at Greenlee). What the students found was they were alike in many ways. The words “organized,” “hardworking,” “intelligent,” “passionate” and “outgoing” (or synonyms) appear prominently in nearly all of their word clouds, but the overall concepts were almost identical. From this exercise, students drew the conclusion that Greenlee either attracts students with these qualities or creates students with these qualities. Either way, our program is a great fit if you are, or want to be, “organized, “hardworking,” “intelligent,” “passionate” and “outgoing.”
Check out a few more examples of Greenlee students’ word clouds:
