A social media gap in the classroom

How one Canadian college is (not) preparing students for a career in PR

I am an April 2010 public relations graduate from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has the only four-year PR degree program in Canada. However, while I really did get a lot of value from my education and I enjoyed the process, please don’t take the next few paragraphs as bashing my school, because that certainly isn’t my intent.

I just want to demonstrate from my own experience what I see as the lack of practical social media training in communication and public relations degrees. Over the past four years, my professors continually reinforced that social media and Web communication would be the wave of the future. However, I believe the future is now!

You would think that being the only school offering a four-year PR degree in the country it would be on the cutting edge of technology and leading the way on social media instruction. That just wasn’t the case. You couldn’t even access the Internet in the classrooms!

Although my degree highlighted the importance of using social media as a method of communication, not one of my professors knew how to use Twitter, Foursquare or any tool other than Facebook.