My internship experience has been exactly that- an EXPERIENCE. Though I’ve only been here about two and a half months, I feel like I’ve learned enough for a lifetime.
A little bit about me… my passion is media advocacy. I love helping others by shining light on public health issues that are stigmatized or otherwise nonexistent in the media. My favorite thing about media advocacy is the research and the networking that happens when you’re working on a project. I’ve been working with my agency supervisor, Jacqueline, on a public health project aimed at educating and advocating for science based policies across the state. During my time here, I’ve been participating in media tracking, research, meetings and presentations, and legislative tracking and messaging. These activities have allowed me to communicate with other professionals, develop professional relationships across the state, and get to know some of the issues that Oklahomans face when accessing public health information.
This experience gave me a public relations perspective on media advocacy. I learned about earned and paid media, and how you can use those tools to reach different levels of your community to get your message across. I also learned that it’s important to get to know your audience- to tailor your message to your community’s readiness to hear what you have to say. I got to see the creation, development, and upkeep of professional relationships between Price Lang and its wide variety of clients, which helped me understand their messaging methods and my community’s needs and wants.
I think that my internship was extremely well-placed because of my interests and the work I was doing at Price Lang. I had the advantage of learning about media advocacy from a public relations standpoint, which really helped me understand my work from a perspective other than one I had earned in the classroom. I was able to develop content that would then be shared in a public context (with other professionals, students, parents, etc.). What I accomplished and learned at Price Lang will help shape where I take my career, because it gave me a wider variety of tools to advocate for issues both in and out of my personal life.
Thank you, Price Lang team!
Erin W. Community/Public Health Program University of Central Oklahoma