What I learned working on Narnia Night
By Ashleigh Graves, a junior media communication major from Greenwood, Ind.
When I signed up for Professor Peter Kerr’s COM 421 class, Theory and Practice of Public Relations, I was vaguely expecting a PR 101 approach to handling the media end of party planning. What I was not expecting was what I got: three months of intensive, on-the-job experience as our small class helped to produce the biggest campus event of the year.
Sponsored by the Lilly Foundation Inc. and the Transformations Project, Narnia Night on December 2, 2005 is designed as a celebration of the works of C.S. Lewis and the much-anticipated cinema release of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (Walt Disney Pictures & Walden Media, December 9, 2005). Open to the media and the local community, this one-of-a-kind event was a collaborative effort between the Asbury College Public Relations Office and a group of about 20 highly driven students under the direction of Professor Kerr. Producing Narnia Night has given my classmates and me a unique exposure to the type of planning and work that goes into producing a large-scale event.
For the past two months, our close-knit class has worked on every conceivable angle of the Narnia Night project, from constructing press kits and media lists to designing advertising and making deals with Turkish Delight vendors. We’ve learned about the finer points of contracts, writing the perfect PSA (public service announcement) and choosing the best sort of paper to print press packets on. We’ve learned what makes a committee efficient (everybody doing their bit) and what makes a committee ineffectual (too many coffee breaks). Mostly, we’ve learned the value of maintaining professionalism and organization in every aspect of our work.
On a personal note, by giving me a chance to be actively involved in a real-life public relations campaign, this class experience has provided me with a lot of vocational direction. Thanks to this class and others, I will graduate next year with a major in applied communications (public relations emphasis), but I will also graduate with a very clear idea of the type of PR that I like to do and the type that I don’t. That may not be terribly important information for me to know right now, but it will become keenly relevant when I start choosing graduate schools programs. And that kind of direction goes a long way in helping students like me to make the transition to the professional world.
