Saying Goodbye

I've come to realize over the past few weeks that having to say goodbye to friends in college is much worse than at high school graduation. I've made so many amazing friends in the PR program and after graduation, they'll all be spread out throughout the country. But while I'm sad to see everyone leave, I'm so excited to see where our careers will take us throughout the years. 

I've loved being a part of the BYU PRSSA Chapter (Public Relations Student Society of America) over the past couple years. We have awesome faculty advisers who have all had great careers of their own before coming here to teach, not to mention really talented students as well. This year our chapter even got the Chapter of the Year award at the PRSSA National Conference -- it's given to only one school out of more than 300 that participate throughout the nation.

We had our year-end banquet last week and I finally got to take some pictures with everyone:

 Some of the graduation seniors

With our lab director, Jeff and his wife. Jeff is the life of the party in our program -- we love him.

Emily and I met in one of our first classes in the program and have been friends ever since -- she's wonderful!

Emily and Michelle -- my fellow Project Hope girls!

 Dr. Plowman, DKP, K-Plow -- one of my favorite professors and in his class where Emily and I worked on our first project together. He's had a great career in politics and as a public affairs officer with the Afghanistan with the U.S. Military. We've learned a lot from him!

We had another fun little year-end party with our PR friends at Spark organized by my lovely friend Lauren. 

 

 

 

 

Lauren is definitely Miss PR and has been so great as our chapter president. We love her! Emily, Lauren, and I have worked on several accounts together and they're definitely two of my best PR friends.

And last but not least, my good friend Patrick. We've been through thick and thin together -- lots of projects and really stressful classes. Besides being the most social media savvy person I know, he leaves after graduation to start a job doing PR for General Motors in Detroit. Can't wait to see where he'll be in 20 years!

 All I can say is I'm really glad I live in the Facebook generation so I can stay in touch with all of my great friends from college - I'll miss them!

Senior Capstone

It's crazy to think that the class I've been preparing for over the past three years has finally come and gone! One of the (many) great things about our PR program is we get the chance to work for real clients throughout many of our classes. For our capstone class this semester, our client was UDOT -- The Utah Department of Transit -- and their new TravelWise program. Our team worked throughout the semester to create a PR campaign that we presented to the UDOT clients last week. I was so happy with how hard our team worked and our clients even chose our team as their favorite. After lots of late nights, early mornings, and a 140-page campaign book, it was definitely worth the hard work.

 Most of our team after the presentation and our whole group at our professor's house afterward

We had a good time with this client and came up with some really fun tactics. Here are some pictures:

 

 

 

We came up with the "Clean Air Polar Bear" for elementary school kids, and I even got to make my first coloring book! 

 Kind of sad to think that my days as PR student are over, but I loved every part of it. In my opinion, it's one of the best majors BYU offers ;)

Flowers!

When it comes to college classes, I definitely saved the best for last. My floral design class has officially come to an end now. We've had an overabundance of flowers in our house (if that's even possible) over the past few months and I'm sad that I won't be getting a new arrangement every other week! So as a tribute to my all-time favorite class, here are some of the arrangements I've done this semester: