The Southern Miss School of Media and Communication recently held its Strategic Communication Week on the Hattiesburg campus, where various communication professionals spoke to students about career paths, internship opportunities, and how they could market themselves to employers.
The Early Career Professionals Panel, hosted in Cook Library, was one of the highlights of the week-long event. It featured USM alums, Jasmine Baxter, the communication and engagement coordinator for the Hattiesburg Public School District; Maddie Engles, the communications manager for Visit Hattiesburg; Danny Holland, the events and public relations assistant at Mississippi INBRE; and Chole Lane, a content strategist at the Focus Group. Each speaker elaborated on their experiences from college to the professional world and gave students advice on networking for career development.
Most of the speakers also discussed the unexpected routes they took after college and how they had to obtain new skills.
“I hadn’t realized how many hats I would wear in my current position,” Holland explained.
Mississippi IMBRE hired him a month before the company’s first conference, which featured keynote speaker, Dr. Thomas Jobs, the state health officer at the time. During that time, Mississippi IMBRE had not done social media postings, which forced Holland to step into graphic design without prior experience. He took the initiative to use his resources, such as LinkedIn Academy, to learn some fundamentals of graphic design. That experience showed him that although your title is doing one position, you never know what could come about and what jobs you will have to take on in your role.
Other panelists, like Baxter, spoke on how to get comfortable with the unknown. She made sure to let the audience know that it is okay to get advice in the workplace, especially from your colleagues, and to get comfortable with networking in your department.
“So, if you’re going into a new space, don’t be afraid to ask questions,” Baxter added. “How has this been done before? What does this process look like? That way, you can build a relationship internally and network.”