Public Relations

What do you come out with? BA

Why do it? Because PR is glamorous. You get to go to launch parties and meet interesting people and talk to celebrities. Whether you become a corporate, consumer or celebrity PR, you have the best of both worlds – wining and dining your clients on the one hand and schmoozing journalists on the other. There’s some truth to the Absolutely Fabulous stereotype: there is a lot of air kissing and champagne involved but the job is rewarding, both intrinsically and financially.

What's it about? It's not just about writing press releases. You need to understand the strategies behind public relations. Courses cover areas such as corporate and social responsibility, online PR, marketing, advertising, business management and organisational behaviour, communication theory, and consumer journalism and broadcast media. At Bournemouth, it is compulsory to spend your third year in industry. You’ll earn a salary during this year, and you’ll gain valuable experience. The University of Central England offers a BA Public Relations and a BA Advertising, Marketing and PR. It offers the chance to spend a year in industry. Westminster offers a BA degree in Media Studies/Public Relations. This is a media studies degree where you can specialise in PR. UCE offers PR as a joint degree with human resource management, management, business or business psychology. Central Lancashire has a four-year PR degree culminating in a dissertation. In the fourth year, students work for UK Progress, a student run public relations consultancy set up by the university that works with real clients.

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How long is a degree? Three years. Four, if you do a year in industry.

What are the students like? Mostly female. Usually pretty glamorous and a bit posh. PR is the kind of career that you get into if you can spend your summers slogging away as an intern. There’s a degree of fluffiness, but underlying this you need serious business acumen and fantastic communication skills. If you’re confident playing devil’s advocate with your client and the world’s media, keeping both onside, this career could be for you.

How is it packaged? There are few exams in most courses. At Central Lancashire there are no final exams, only class tests. The majority of the course is a mix between group work, presentations, essays and case studies.

What A-levels do you need? Most universities aren't too picky although they like to know you can communicate. They prefer English, psychology, sociology, politics, business studies, law or communication.

What grades? BBC (280 UCAS points) at Bournemouth. Central Lancashire wants 220-280 points. Leeds Met 260 points.

Will you be interviewed? Occasionally at Bournemouth. They run workshops on open days for you to get a feel for the course. Not at most places.

Will it keep you off the dole? Like marketing, PR is one of the first things to be cut during a recession, despite being considerably cheaper for big businesses to use than magazine or newspaper advertising. If the times are good, senior comms people can earn £100,000 or more, especially in financial PR. Starting out as a press officer at a medium sized consumer PR firm you can expect to be paid £20,000 starting salary and spend most of your time parcelling up and sending off merchandise that have been “called in” by the fashion desks of the Nationals. The perks are great as you’ll end up with tons of freebees. There’s scope to do a lot of interesting PR in the charity or public sector but the pay is not as good.

What do students say? "The course made me want to go into PR more than ever. In the third and fourth years you go to work for clients in account teams. I really enjoyed the mix of theory with the vocational side. The first year was more theory based. It was hard to understand how it applied to the future, but you realise later how useful it is. The theory could be daunting at times," says Verity Lowe, PR graduate from Central Lancashire.

"I am a creative person so I enjoy anything to do with writing. The maths and finance bits were bad but economics and politics was interesting," says Nick Fishleigh, who graduated from Bournemouth.

Where can you do it? Bangor, Bedfordshire, Birmingham City University, Bournemouth, Buckinghamshire New University, University of Central Lancashire, University of Chester, Coventry, University for the Creative Arts, De Montfort, Derby, East London University, Edinburgh Napier, European Business School, University College Falmouth, Glasgow Caledonian University, Greenwich, Hertfordshire, Huddersfield, Leeds Trinity & All Saints, Leeds Metropolitan, Lincoln, London College, London Metropolitan, Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores, Luton, Manchester Metropolitan, Middlesex, Newcastle, Northampton, Northumbria, Queen Margaret University, Robert Gordon, Sheffield Hallam, Southampton Solent University, Sunderland, Swansea, Thames Valley, Ulster, University of the Arts London, Westminster, Wolverhampton, Worcester.

Where's the cutting edge? At Bournemouth it's on-line PR, issues management and corporate and social responsibility. Central Lancashire is developing a partner institute in the Netherlands for its student-run UK progress consultancy. It is hoping to establish a pan-European consultancy.

Who are the stars? Dr. Kevin Maloney at Bournemouth, Jaqui L'Etang at Stirling, Professor John White at Central Lancashire, Magda Pieczka is at Queen Margaret University.

Related courses: Public relations is most commonly combined with advertising, management and marketing. You can also combine it with business, business psychology, human resources management, management and business law. Ulster offer degrees in government, linguistics, politics, communication or language with PR. Thames Valley combine it with advertising, new media journalism, music technology, digital animation, design for interactive media and digital arts. At Sunderland the list is phenomenal. For a zany option why not take public relations joint honours with culinary arts at Derby.