You are finally starting your public relations major courses and are done with most of your college’s core curriculum. Hopefully by now you have your major curriculum course guide printed off and you have a pretty good idea about how you need to setup your classes in order to graduate in your desired time frame.

This is great, but there might be a few things your not thinking about and that’s not your fault. Heed the advice of those who have come before you. There are few tips that you can use to help navigate the public relations major a little easier. These are tips that cannot be found on your curriculum coarse guide.

Hopefully you have survived the trilogy courses and your newspaper fundamentals course and you are ready to enter your first public relations class.

The foundations of public relations course will serve as a general introduction of l what lies ahead of you. You will learn the history of public relations, how it is applied and you will do some basic writing. Like stated before, its kind of like an introduction to the major.

After you complete this course you can then take the case studies class, survey research methods class, writing class and style and design class.

Once you have completed these classes, excluding style and design, you can then enroll in the campaigns class where you will utilize the things you have learned in previous courses.

Style and design is not a prerequisite for campaigns, but students should seriously considering taking it before the campaign class. A lot of these course work will be very beneficial to you when you start developing a public relations campaign in the campaigns course.

It is recommend that you take no more than three of these courses at a time due to their large workloads.

Some public relations students will tell you that taking a couple of particular classes at the same time should be avoided whenever possible.

Jeff Hajek is a senior in public relations at Auburn University. He tells us about his experiences.

“My greatest bit of advice as far as following the pr curriculum is first of all print of the sheet and follow what they have,” said Hajek. “Probably my biggest piece of advice is to not take case studies and style and design together. I had friends do that and it was an awful semester for them.”

“Definitely take style and design before you take your campaign class because I am sure that it will benefit you when you’re doing a campaign for a company,” said Hajek.

The case studies course and style and design course require a lot of time. It would be a good idea to take them in separate semesters.

Below is a recommended outline for your public relations courses.

Semester A

• PRCM 3040 Foundations of Public Relations

Semester B

• PRCM 3050 Case Studies
• PRCM 4080 Writing for Public Relations

Semester C

• PRCM 4020 Style and Design
• PRCM 4510 Survey and Research Methods

Semester D

• PRCM 4090 PR Campaigns

This schedule is ideal for the major, but registering for classes is always challenging in the public relations major. Students should avoid stressing about getting into classes. It will eventually work out. The above is just an ideal succession of classes designed for the easiest and most beneficial experience in the major.

Hopefully this brief outline will help those who are feeling a little overwhelmed with class registration and the public relations major.



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