Dress rehearsal

It’s time, it’s time, it’s time, it’s time!!

It’s my favorite time of the quarter! The time when I get to see my students’ hard work come to fruition! The time when I sit back in awe at how creative and brilliant our future as a whole really is! The time when I get so excited because my students have once again gone beyond the necessary and gone to the extreme! It’s dress rehearsals for group projects!

This quarter, my social media class divided into six groups to partner with six start-up companies. And when I say start-up, I mean one-person operations. One is a photography business, one is a prayer journal (that I have mentioned before), one is an online boutique, etc. These are businesses that would benefit greatly from social media management skills. My students will, in one week, propose a social media campaign that will show them what platforms they need to use, what audience demographic they should target, and give them examples of posts for each platform.

Tomorrow – tomorrow – I get to critique their dress rehearsals for these pitches. Dress rehearsals are vital to get all the bugs out of the system before the clients see the finished, flawless project. Not only will they see any technical difficulties they may have with the presentation, but they will receive feedback on their presentation as well as with their hard-copy pitch. These are all intelligent students with fantastic editing skills – but nothing is perfect. I am a pretty dadgum good copy editor myself, and when I was close to graduating with my undergraduate degree, I asked several editors to look over my resume. They tweaked a few items but overall praised it. I took it to a technical writing firm, and before I sat down for the interview, one of the interviewers said, “Hey, you have a proofreading error on your resume. Did you know that?” None of my proofreaders saw that.

Obviously, I did not get the job.

But I digress – the point of that little rabbit trail was to explain that even group work editing needs assistance.

They had a team workshop last week, and as I flitted around from group to group, I was so impressed with their ideas. They’re working with such a variety of creative businesses with a wide range of social media capabilities. One businesswoman is quite adept at social media, and her posts are already amazing. Her group is working to help her take her business to the next level, using her knowledge to boost her sales even higher. Then we have businesses whose heads are not sure how to use social media or what to do to increase brand awareness on any platform – and those students are working on a game plan that gives specifics of what to do, where to do it, and when to do it. And – wait, there’s more! We have business leaders who don’t have time – they have a family or another job or this profession is a side gig – at any rate, my students are working on a plan that will help them grow their social media engagement with a time management plan. It’s great – it’s so great, y’all. This week is exciting, and I am already so proud of all of their work.

And, yes – this is me this week.