This will be the last blog post I will write for my Intro to Social Media Principles class. This class was definitely not what I was expecting, but as a mechanical engineer jumping into the world of public relations I don't know if there was much I really could know to expect. To be honest I took this class because it was the last semester of my senior year in college and I was hoping to take a class that wouldn't require to much thinking, especially compared to the last three and a half years of engineering school.
I may have been looking for an easier class but I think as an engineering I got more out of the class than I thought I would. In the world of engineering being able to communicate with other people is a trait that is sought after because the stereotypical engineer generally isn't very good in social situations. It is important to be able to communicate your thoughts in ways that people around you who did not go to school for engineering will understand. When you go to school for engineering you are essentially learning a new language and for those who are not around it all the time they will not necessarily understand what you are saying because the terms you use are not common outside of the world of engineering.
This class has helped me work on my communication skills for when I am not writing a technical engineering report and instead may be writing an email to a customer. Although I do not use social media very often I think their are other skills you gain from this class in terms with being able to communicate with your coworkers and other people around you. The class also forced me to be a little creative sometimes, having to write three blogs a week was pretty difficult to come up with new things to talk about each week. I would find I spend more time sitting in front of the computer trying to figure out what to write than I would actually writing the blog post.
I would say that in the end I actually enjoyed the class, and I think my time spent for the class was well spent. Not to say it did not annoy me at times, but I learned a lot of things from this class that I would not have learned in the engineering college. The class itself was very light hearted and as an engineer in an unfamiliar world it made it a lot less stressful to be out of my comfort zone.
