By: Asia Suggs
During the registration process for the Fall 2021 semester, I saw Hawk Communications listed as a “Special Topics” course. Upon reading the description I was intrigued, but also interested when I saw Professor Green was teaching the course. Those who haven’t had the pleasure of taking one of his courses should try to get connected with him because he’s knowledgeable and actually cares about his students. I understood this course to be something like an externship, and walked away with tremendous experience.
This class got intense almost immediately. Within the first two weeks we had already received background on the clients we might work with and prioritized the ones we were most interested in working with. I had the opportunity to work with Loved and Lost and The Monarchs. Both teams were comprised of amazing people with great visions for their companies. Part of the Loved and Lost team a portion of my duties went to managing the communication between our teams, creating a new logo for re-branding, and reaching out to news outlets for “promotional purposes.” As part of The Monarchs, I initially intended to be part of event planning and fundraising, but that quickly turned into helping with social media content and creating flyers and posts for their Instagram page.
Being a part of helping these organizations build was challenging, but eye opening. I know that part of pitching concepts is being rejected, but for some reason I anticipated that any contribution or idea we had would be accepted. That absolutely wasn’t the case; pushes for rebranding and fundraising were denied or put on the back burner- both things that my team and I felt were necessities in getting their businesses off of the ground. The most difficult part of handling client accounts was being productive, even though there was little change in the weekly actions. When a client is only looking for you to do specifically one or two things and nothing more, then how do you challenge yourself to think outside the box and fulfill their needs without being repetitious?
Thinking of Hawk Communications as more than a class helps to mentally prepare for any internship or externship. Rather than considering it as another course I considered it a potential job opportunity which made it more engaging and helped shrug off the senioritis, and I’m thankful to have been able to experience this course.