Pardon my French…

“Fermez vos livres, sous vos pupitre. Maintenant! Vite! Vite! Et Prenez un crayon ou un stylo bleu ou noir et passez les cartes.”

Translation: Close your books, put them under your desk. Now! Quickly! And take out a pencil or black or blue pen and pass in the cards.

I still haven't been to Paris, but I hope to go someday

One of my high school French teachers* used to say that phrase before every single test or quiz. Eight years later, that and everything else I learned in French 1 remain the only things I remember from the language.

On our exams, she required us to write down one or two sentence answers (in French, of course). I always did three to five. People hated me, but it was the first and only non-honors or non-arts class** I took where I didn’t care how many times I got called teacher’s pet because I really liked French.

Before college, being an over-achiever was as far away from cool as the equator is to the Arctic Circle. Post high school, you are hounded about standing out because breaking down norms is what changes the world.

For most of us students, we’re in what I like to call “internship season.” Everyone wants one, but not everybody gets one. When we do get them, we feel like the greatest person to ever walk on planet earth. The only way to get the best ones is to ditch our high school selves and give your intended employer a unique reason to want you. Or so it seems.

As an undergrad I took three unpaid, sports-related internships. I didn’t care if they were unpaid because I thought that was how undergraduate internships worked. I loved my internships and learned a lot about sports media and communication practices in general. As I entered my master’s program, I was under the assumption that sports PR and marketing firms would have an enhanced value for my differences and creativity. I’m different because I chose to keep learning. I like to think my writing style is unique; if I want to get fancy, I could call myself a literary designer. I’m a sports-obsessed female. And if anyone criticizes me I don’t feel like I want to crawl under the covers and bawl my eyes out because at this age, we’re supposed to be different.

Unfortunately, I should know by now what happens when you assume something.

Feel free to converse and debate with me, but in the last three months I’ve found the worst internships for graduate PR majors are in sports PR. I hate to be the one to make the call-outs (or do I…?) but every single sports PR internship I have looked at is not only unpaid but lists the duties in a way that only translates to “follow professionals around, don’t create your own stuff, but HEY, our company looks good on a resume because sooooo many people apply.”

So what do I do? Keep plugging away until I find something sports-related that will embrace my creativity or do I conform to what the firms want, because it’s supposed to be an excellent opportunity?

I’ve decided on neither. I’m not being a sell-out to my dreams, I’m being true to my creativity. If anyone else out there is like me, you’re probably wondering what the point of pursuing non-sports endeavors does for a resume. I say, why try to make something look good on paper if you didn’t really enjoy it. I’m still in the looking/interviewing phase of my internship search. I’ve come across a few agencies that would not only challenge my skills, but allow me to work alongside some of the most creative people in the business. I like what I see from them. I hope they like what they see from me.

That microphone is as outdated as Larry Dolan's PR department.

Maybe the problem with sports PR internships is that sports PR itself isn’t given high regard. Only .0175 percent of bloggers (at most) referenced sports PR in the last 30 days. And most sports organizations handle their own PR rather than using outside assistance from agencies. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but if you’re going to use the same business plan, year after year, season after season, you aren’t really changing with your target audience.

Writing is part of PR, or any other marketing, advertising, communications or design business. It’s the part I like to think I excel the most. If I can’t work somewhere where I can write, in addition to learning new skills, what’s the point of putting in the time? Do I want to work in the sports industry or at least handle sports clients someday? Absolutely. But at this point, I’d rather work on what makes me stand out than fall into a pattern of mediocrity. If there’s anything else I learned in that French class besides how to conjugate a verb, it’s that you should never settle for anything less than your best work, even if you have to take a different path to get where you think you want to be.

*********

*When I transferred my sophomore year, my new French teacher failed to really get me to understand the language past a basic level. She was a wonderful, nice person, but never reached me like my old teacher had. To this day, I’m not really sure who’s at fault for this.

**I say non-honors or non-arts because those were the classes it was okay to try in. These classrooms were the only safe places to excel. We weren’t pressured into mediocrity because the average and under-achieving people were the outcasts. And probably still are.

Footnotes: Off-topic odds and ends about Twitter spam

Back in December I received a tweet simply saying “Hey, can I see your feet?”

Eww.

Even "cute" baby feet make me shudder at the sight of them.

Little known personal fact: I HATE feet. I think people with foot fetishes are the most sexually disgusting people in the world (besides pedophiles and rapists, of course). Worse than people with foot fetishes are people with foot fetishes that have the nerve to ask someone on Twitter if they can aid in their twisted fantasy. Of course, before I hit the block button, I had to view his 160-character bio. It read “Sean. Foot Lover. I’m new to this thing, but I love beautiful feet. A lot.”

I repeat…eww.

Fast forward to last week. Once again, I had a tweet from the SAME SICK EXCUSE FOR A MAN, asking me to show him my feet. I’m pretty sure his Twitter name was different, and the bio most certainly was. This new and improved description cut right to the point; all it said was “FOOT LOVER.” Once again, the Block and Report Spam button was utilized.

Anyone active in the Twitterverse is susceptible to Twitter spam. At this point, spammers don’t usually phase me. As a sports person, I get sports spammers all the time, as well as other randoms. I just block them and forget who they are the next day. FOOT LOVER took Twitter spam to new heights. As creepy and extreme as it was, he got me thinking: Do people new to Twitter understand what is spam and what is just a friendly follow?

Someone naive to the Twitter game might have found FOOT LOVER so terrifying that it drove them to put that little padlock next to their name (this is called making your Tweets private). While creepers like him are repulsive, don’t go hiding your personal brand behind closed doors just yet!

Those of us who are overactive on the medium can tell you it isn’t as scary as it seems. The site actually has an extensive help center to ease some of your concerns. There, you can find all the boundaries and signs of Twitter abuse, as well as how to detect a spammer and keep yourself from being a spammer. Key spammer trademarks include:

• Tweets that almost always consist of links, rather than personal updates
• Automated responses to a particular mention
• Users who follow thousands but have few followers and even fewer tweets
• Users who post others’ tweets as their own
• Unrelated tweets to a trending topic, even though they use that topic’s hashtag
• Tweets which consistently are false or misleading
• Users without a picture (Not always the case, but it’s more common for spammers to be image-free than real people)
• People with names like hottseXXXiibabe are known as porn spammers. I know some of you gentlemen (and maybe some of you ladies) new to Twitter might be fooled into thinking someone like this has something of value to show you, but they don’t. So block them. NOW!

I find the tone of Twitter’s spam section to be more of a “you know you’re a spammer if…” That right there should deter people from venturing into spam territory, yet it still happens. Kind of like the show “To Catch a Predator,” known as #TCAP in the Twitterverse. We all know the show exists, yet pedophiles still try to meet up with children they met in chat rooms, not thinking their faces might be plastered all of TV the next day. Social media guru Jeff Hester put together a pretty good spread of typical spammer profiles. Is “To catch a spammer” in the future? One can only hope.

A graphic from the Twitter blog explaining the decline in spam as Twitter has grown in popularity

Twitter does its part in trying to minimize the spam crowd, but its never really going to disappear. I’m sure it will be a matter of time before FOOT LOVER resurfaces and asks me his favorite question. By knowing the difference between spammers, creepers and people who really care what we have to say, we can save ourselves the frustrating dilemma of determining who’s worthy of our micro-blogging skills. So don’t be afraid to be yourself. Despite the pests out there, Twitter can be a lot less sketchy than the rest of the Internet and can be of huge benefit to your brand, personal or professional.