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Similar to the flow of my class last year, this year’s course often left me engrossed in conversations with my students about current trending events. While they can sometimes get heated, open conversations always serve as a great learning opportunity.

Perception is everything – especially in the world of Public Relations. This week, I was away on vacation so my TA, Adam, stepped in to teach. Afterwards, we debriefed about class and what the students were buzzing about this week.

Image via New York Daily News

Ever since I started teaching this capstone, I’ve structured it in the same way. Each week has a theme such as integrated communications, entrepreneurship and crisis communications, which is accompanied with class notes and reading assignments that I upload to Blackboard. Now as many of my students who are reading this blog know all too well, sometimes we don’t always make it to discussing the class notes. We value the class discussion of issues that are on the student’s minds, leaving them to review supplemental materials outside of class time.

I teach two courses every spring at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications to students in their final year of study in public relations. In each class I share industry stats from The Council of PR Firms (CPRF) Benchmark Studies and results from USC’s Annenberg School for Communications Generally Accepted Practices (GAP VIII) Study. The former focuses on PR agencies perspectives, the later on corporations, government agencies and non-profit organizations. As proud as I am to see results from the CPRF’s Q2 Benchmark Study highlighting that PR firms are expecting a 10% growth in 2014 (PAN is expecting a growth this year closer to 20%); I was particularly interested to see that for the first time ever, the GAP VIII respondents indicated THE TOP REASON they are working with agencies is the “added intellectual value that agencies bring” and not for the extra arms & legs.

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