POSTED BY Thomas Willis

A PhD in Classics and English Literature might not look like the most natural point from which to jump into PR, but many of the skills you learn doing a humanities PhD are highly relevant for PR work and train you in effective communication. With all that time in dusty libraries, it is also a pleasure and a privilege to get to take those skills and put them in a team setting.

Once academic research has been done, it is important for that research to be exposed to people, to the general public, and for the important messages of the research to be broadcast widely, for its findings to be disseminated and thereby being able to effect society at large. This is as important for researchers as it is for research itself; professors are assessed more and more on the academic and wider “impact” of their research.

Showcasing the strengths and advantages of an MBA programme is crucial for institutions to present their best aspects to the world and potential students. Many stakeholders have an interest in the MBA being shined and shown off, such as current students, other institutions offering MBAs, board members, faculty, and alumni.

Today, the world is always online. Increasingly, what matters is what happens online. When an event of any notes happens, its ramifications are debated online. Now, public and personal opinion is decided on the internet. Brands and companies have never been more concerned about what happens online. Reputations are bought, busted, and buoyed on the internet. Although the feelings people have toward brands and companies still happen in people’s minds (for now), the content each person works with to form opinion is primarily found on the internet. For these reasons and more, digital PR has never been more important.

Journalists are flooded with emails and pitches. With there being around six PRs to every journalist nowadays, their inboxes are waterlogged. They exist in a bog of emails and pitches. But how can you get them to open your email, how do you hook them with your pitch?

Why you need to leverage alumni success To attract star talent to your MBA programme, you need to show why your MBA is the one to take; to demonstrate that it is dynamic, lively, relevant and, above all, fundamentally worthwhile.