Your/our future looks bright from here

Our future also looks good from here

As the last public relations intern left the interview room, I remembered the wording on a Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University t-shirt: “Your future looks good from here”.

Staff from across all seven faculties wore these navy blue t-shirts at our Open Day when prospective students can check out what’s on offer at the university in a one-stop shop set-up. We wanted these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed school leavers to get the message from the wording that they’re going to be in good hands if they decide to do their undergraduate studies with us.

An NMMU student welcomes prospective students at Open Day

But this week – after five public relations intern candidates completed their interviews to work in our Marketing and Corporate Relations Department next year – I imagined an updated T-shirt. This time the words would read: Our future looks bright from here.

Why?

Because, in the hands of such candidates, we do have a bright future.

These candidates gave us HOPE for our future.

These second-year public relations students, who need to do a practical year in order to complete their three-year diploma, were bright, knowledgeable, well-read, well-dressed and enthusiastic. They knew their stuff and they also know where they want to go in terms of their future.

We were so impressed and inspired by the calibre of the candidates that we’d employ each one of them if we could, but we can’t. So instead we’ve alerted our graduate placement office to recommend these students to those NMMU faculties who recognise the value that PR interns add and hire them.

Bill Gates recognises their value. He once said “if I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on PR”.

(As an aside, last week a group of PR students organised a student PR conference in partnership with Absa and what a fine job they did in bringing industry experts together to share their insights.)

(And as a further aside, the student who was eventually selected to join our team in 2015 was the one who knows that success does not come to those who wait. Success comes to those who pursue their dreams. He’d spent a week with us – with no pay and no other expectations – during the mid-year recess to get “a feel for his future”.)

So you have to agree that if these PR students are a barometer for the standard and calibre of all NMMU students, then our future looks bright from here. Not just our future as a university but that of our country too.