Beckah Porter: ENG-PWR,’16
Homecoming week has officially arrived! Which means for some of us that our old friends we said goodbye to at graduation are now knocking on our doors, but for others, it makes us think: what are we going to do after we graduate? Are we even prepared? (Cue the freak out) This week I am going to take a further look into what alumnus are up to and how other PWR majors navigated their way through the professional world.
With registration right around the corner, it is important to consider the classes that you will be pick, because the alumnus stated, they do matter. 
Emily Bishop, who graduated last spring, stated “because of my background in rhetoric I have been able to find each of the individuals/company’s voices and write specific, branded messages for each of them.” Emily currently manages a restaurant app, a lawyer, a company who sends athlete’s abroad, as well as blog for her company on anything that would be interesting to her readers so as Emily says, “there’s a lot of voices to keep straight and rhetoric has helped me tremendously.”
Kimberly Lilienthal, who is currently working on her master’s degree at North Carolina State University, commented that the “engaged learning model that is prominent at Elon made me much more confident to step into teaching than I might have been otherwise. Both in and out of the classroom at Elon, I had the opportunity to facilitate discussions among peers, collaborate and take initiative in projects, and be accountable for how my actions impacted others.” The PWR classes that are offered at Elon can allow for students to learn the necessary skills that are required of them when they leave Elon and enter into the professional world.
The classes that are offered at Elon have a positive impact on students to enter a life after undergraduate school to be more prepared and have more options. During the summer, Emily has worked at a bookstore and in September she landed an internship with the company that she wanted called Social Buzz Pros, which is a start up company. The company specializes in running social media sites for other start up companies, so Emily stays busy managing the various social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter for businesses and individuals in the area.
Kimberly on the other hand went right to graduate school (NCSU) after leaving Elon MA in English with a focus in Rhetoric and Composition. When discussing her plans after Elon, Kimberly said, “I knew that graduate school was the path I needed to take to do what I want to do in the future, and I wanted to continue studying rhetoric and composition because I am passionate about the research I wanted to do there. Recently a Ph.D student told me that I was the strangest most ideological graduate student he had ever met because I genuinely just wanted to keep learning and thinking and doing research.” Although Kimberly is a fulltime student, she is a teaching assistant who is looking forward to teaching two of her own sections of first-year composition (English 101)
The possibilities for Elon students entering the professional world are endless, as long as students take the initiative to do so. Students should be careful, and extra mindful about picking out their classes because the experiences that are gained in the classroom are practical skills that can be applied to other situations outside of Elon. Having PWR as a major, influences student to develop the abilities to communicate efficiently and effectively in the career world.
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