Fake It Until You Make It, Because Real Life Doesn't Have Credits

My final semester at the Mayborn school was not going great. I had never been a great student, but I wasn't terrible, I was getting by. Then I entered my senior year and I was starting to hit against a wall. All at once I needed to find an internship and I needed to get prepared to enter the real world. I had put off the work of preparing for a career for too long, and I needed to get it done. At the same time, I'd decided to work on campus during my final semester. I thought I could handle it, but I've been increasingly wrong. I felt like I was drowning.

This week in my class on PR communications, we had a guest speaker; DCTA marketing and PR manager Adrienne Hamilton. She was there to give a talk about best practices, and how to find and keep work in the business. It's exactly the kind of advice I needed to hear, so I was listening. But soon her talk got a bit more real than I thought it would. She recounted a story of a coworker who she had gotten along well with, and she soon became friends with. About a month after she'd taken the job, Hamilton was on a vacation with her parents when she received a text message from said coworker saying that she had been fired. Her boss had given her chance after chance to get better, to do what she was being asked to do, but she failed to perform and was let go. Hamilton learned a lesson from that.

"You have to be able to keep up," she says. "You need to be ready to do the work, to hit a deadline, and to do it right."

Public relations deals with constantly updating information, and doing the job right requires keeping up with that information and responding to it. Constantly. Crises do not take a break. The public does not stop updating. You need to stay in the game, day in and day out. If you can't handle it, you need to find other work, because that is just how it is. I already felt like I wasn't keeping up just as a student, this seemed to confirm a real fear of mine. That when I did hit the real world, I wouldn't be able to do it.

But she had hope, as well. It had been a cold, wet day that day, like it had for the past week. But she, despite the taxing nature of her profession, had come in with a warm smile ready to motivate people. When things get overwhelming, you learn to fake it until you make it, and Hamilton and made it. She had a polished presentation to put on and a well-made portfolio to show the class, with advice on how to do it. She's succeeded in a very competitive business, and she has advice on how to do it too. She hopes that we will see her example and better ourselves by it.

When Hamilton arrived to speak, she came in on a rainy day with an umbrella taller than her, like Mary Poppins. But when Mary Poppins flies away on that umbrella at the end of that movie, that's when the credits roll. The audience doesn't get to see how those kids lives turned out, or how the father's new career at the reformed bank went, or even what Mary's next job is. We know that she did good in this moment, and that's supposed to be enough. Real life isn't like that; there's no moment where everything is wrapped up and the credits roll. In real life, things keep going, there are no neat endings. And to operate in the real world, you need to roll with that and keep up. Hamilton acted as our Mary Poppins that day, but only because she's learned how to do that.