The Best Job on Campus

By Karen Riedel

In my career in university communications, I have crossed the Atlantic on a research vessel, watched students develop photographs in Italy of the Duomo of Florence, and felt crunchy fossils from deep-sea cores. I have talked to an electrical engineer about a wireless Internet several years before it existed. I have smelled the chemicals burning during a firefighter-training course. I have arranged banquets for scientists in Tokyo, tours for Spaniards in Malaga, and dinners for 400 in Bologna. I have interviewed a Nobel laureate, a Rome Prize artist, and Miss Texas USA. I have met the presidents of the United States and the European Commission, the current U.S. deputy director of defense, and a 20-year-old leader in the Russian youth movement. I now live in Bologna, Italy.

For more than 20 years I have been employed in university relations at three different universities. And although my job titles have changed -- public-information officer, coordinator of information services (before it meant something entirely different), and director of publications -- my purpose remains the same: to inform, to persuade, and to promote the university and its programs to its various constituents.

For those looking for a change or a challenge, I contend that you will find few jobs in a university to match communications for variety, creativity, and personal growth.

Almost all colleges and universities have some sort of office whose employees promote the university. Staff sizes vary from one-person shops -- in which the poorly paid and overworked employee often serves as writer, editor, designer, photographer, and Web provider -- to large university operations of 30 people or more. Or a university may have several staffs, each assigned to individual colleges, programs, or institutes on the campus.

It's a good thing most of us like what we do -- the salaries aren't great. New editors and writers usually start out in the low $20s and $30s. Managing editors or senior writers average $40,000 to $60,000 a year, while the head of a public-affairs department can earn $60,000 to $100,000.

We are the folks who produce the news releases and the publications, ranging from one-page fact sheets to 120-page magazines; from brochures, booklets, and newsletters to invitations, employee manuals, and commencement programs. We produce the words and images for television, video, CDs, and Powerpoint presentations. And after a rocky start in information services (in the newest sense), university communications, on most campuses, now has responsibility for the content and design of the institution's Web site.

We write the presidents' speeches and offer counsel on branding, marketing, and media relations. University spokespeople know the secrets, the scandals, and the yet-to-break stories. But we are also on the front line when tragedy occurs. My colleagues have been their institution's gatekeeper in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, the Texas A&M; bonfire collapse, and a murder-suicide on the opening day of the academic year.

For those who relish power, you should know that the communications office is also usually the logo cop, usage czar, and squelcher of renegade newsletters, errant business cards, and department-designed letterhead. And imagine the thrill of being the university's arbiter on its use of the serial comma.

Although the job requirements on paper will most likely follow standards set by the human-resources department, the range of duties in communications allows creative people to find their niche, learn new skills, and follow different career paths.

Take my career, for instance. I was first hired as a public-information officer for a school district. Although my main job was to write news releases, my duties included photographing school events, producing newsletters, brochures, and publications, being the host of television and radio shows, and managing media relations. My career goes so far back that I produced newsletters with an Exacto knife, a straight edge, and a waxer. I laboriously transformed press type into the masthead and titles, and to this day I can spot a misalignment a mile away, I have an unseemly passion for fonts, and I view two spaces after the period as a more serious offense than income-tax evasion.

My first job at a major university (Texas A&M;) taught me how a public-relations office functions when the work is spread out among several staff members. We were assigned beats, made media visits, produced tip sheets, and experimented with a new thing called electronic transmission. In a subsequent position, I found myself immersed in writing about plate tectonics, back-arc basins, and sea-floor spreading. I also learned about the problems of conveying scientific research in a way that interests the public but respects the scientists' work. In yet another job, I managed the equivalent of an in-house ad agency. We produced more than 1,000 publications a year, and our office was involved with every aspect of the university, including efforts to reverse a declining enrollment, introduce an integrated marketing plan, and launch the institution's first advertising campaign.

I mention these experiences to illustrate the variety of opportunities available in communications, the perfect slot for the curious, the creative, and the idealistic.

University writers never lack for material and variety. Dragnet's Joe Friday got it right when he correlated the number of stories relative to the population of Los Angeles. The same one-to-one relationship applies to a university. You may be called upon to interview anyone from the president to the groundskeeper (story angles for the latter interview include spring planting tips for the employee newsletter, a news release on an experimental pest-control method, or a human-interest story on the employee's prize-winning day lilies). You meet, work with, and write about students, faculty members, and alumni. You learn about the depth and breadth of the university -- its departments, its stars, its curriculum, its recruiting efforts, its donors, and its dirty secrets.

You are rewarded for being a jack of all trades. Writers are encouraged to learn publishing programs like Quark and Photoshop and technological languages like HTML. Designers can write headlines, create conceptual themes, and proofread copy. Photographers are now digital-imaging specialists, the wet darkroom as outdated as Office 95.

You can chart your own course. Communicators in larger departments, for instance, are assigned to beats, so you often get paid to write about something you care about or have studied. In fact, writers with a specialty have an inside track, especially in science and medicine. Management is another option. Communicators often make good managers, using their creativity to find new ways to inspire, challenge, and lead.

And finally, in promoting a university, you are strengthening a commitment to higher education and confirming one of the nation's best assets, one that provides opportunity, enlightenment, and life changes.

I am now back in a two-member department. I was offered the job at the Johns Hopkins University's Bologna Center, a graduate school in international relations, largely because my magpie ways have helped me accumulate bits of experience across the communications spectrum. One of the reasons I took the position was to add alumni relations to my portfolio. Of course, the fact that the job offered the best of both worlds, an American university in Italy, with regular travel throughout Europe, helped me to decide. But the opportunity also confirmed my belief that by luck and by design I have chosen one of the best jobs in academe.