To Blog or Not to Blog

So here I am. Finished school. Embarking on a career. This blog is no longer mandatory to maintain, as it has been marked and filed away in the history of Centennial College marks that I will most likely never look back upon again. And yet I find that a huge piece of me still wishes it was. I needed an excuse to write just to do it: I think that the largest battle I have waged when it comes to my love of writing is the fact that a large part of my external persona does not mesh well with the concept of being a writer. I’ve played sports from the day I could walk. I wear baseball caps and sweatpants whenever possible, and the term ‘jock,’ is a label that has been placed on me more and more after I left high school (oddly enough, when I began to play a few less sports). I spend a ton of time telling stupid jokes with friends over a beer or a game of X-box, and being friends with a bunch of guys’ guys means I’m not likely to bring up a screenplay I wrote as a side job or a book I was working on when I broke my ankle. Most of the time, I feel like the Adam I am with buddies, girls and hockey teams comes across as nothing like the Adam who takes a seat and writes.

Yet I can’t ignore my desire to do these things, to sit down for a few minutes and clear my head, put some thoughts on paper or pound away at a keyboard until I feel satisfied with something I’ve produced from nowhere. As awkward as it may seem sometimes to read these things back to myself, I like doing them. And I’ve never been one to stop doing something I liked for fear of what others might think about me, even if it was tough at the beginning.

Yet this is where I find myself when deciding whether or not to keep this blog going. I’ve never been a fan of people who tell the world what they think just to do it: I always promised myself that if I was going to use my writing in some type of productive form, I was going to be paid to do it. In my head, that was the way I equated this weird passion I had with maintaining my sense of manliness: ridiculous, but the way I felt nonetheless. On one of the last day of classes, an instructor told us that maintaining our blogs was important: it would keep our writing skills fresh, and serve as a sort of online portfolio that could be immediately referenced by those in the professional world you were trying to impress. That was good enough for me.

So I’ve decided to keep this thing going, if just for the next little while. The job that I am currently doing has me serving as the editor of various technical publications, and so does not give me many opportunities to write creatively or passionately. I’d like to keep the rust off, and to be perfectly honest, I just enjoy doing it. I’ve had some decent feedback from some teachers and friends, and in checking the amount of hits I have after each new blog post, I know that there are definitely some people reading what I have to say. I thank you for that, as the biggest compliment for a writer of any kind is that people are actually taking the time to listen to them.

Where exactly Only the Good Blog Young is headed, I don’t truly know. I would like to keep adding some PR posts (as this was the blog’s original intention), but like fellow blogger Adam Amato in the U.S (Seriously, we found each other through Facebook), I definitely wouldn’t mind writing more on sports and the fairer sex. If anyone out there has any suggestions on future posts, I’m ready to get my Piano Man on and take requests. Until then, thanks to those of you who enjoy spending a few minutes of their day on my words, and I hope to keep you coming back in the future.

‘til next time, keep fit and have fun.

I’m sorry, I obviously stole that from BodyBreak. Always wanted to say it.

Adam

Reflective Piece

I came into Centennial’s Corporate Communications and Public Relations program a confused individual. I had dropped out of Seneca’s program in September, scared off by my rough estimate of 40+ presentations by the end of the year. I had entered that program convinced that writing would be the key to success in those classes, and as an extension, public relations itself. When I saw the talent of most of my classmates in terms of being able to stand up in front of a group of strangers and deliver a seemingly well-organized speech on the spot, I began to wonder if I had made the right choice. I left the program a couple days before the cut-off deadline (regrettably leaving behind a great group of classmates), and planned to transfer over to Centennial for the semester. Unfortunately, I broke my ankle the next day and was put out of commission until mid-November. When I healed, I put in a last-minute push to begin the winter semester at Centennial, and managed to work things out. Regardless, going in to January 2010, I no longer had any true idea what I was getting into.

While I was a little hesitant walking in to what we now affectionately refer to as “Bruce’s class” that first day, I was immediately teamed up with a couple of classmates who would become two of my closest friends by the end of the year: Stephen D’Angelo and Kim Foster. By the end of the second week, most of the class was pretty tight and it became easier to just focus on picking up the information we were receiving with each passing lesson.

While we were assigned presentations in various classes, I felt comfortable with the balance between writing, speaking, social media, event management and the like, and as the early months went by I began to feel as if I had made the right decision in pursuing CC+PR as a future. Writing played just as important a role as my ability to deliver a memorized speech, and I began to feel more comfortable in all facets of the program. With this balance in mind, my perception on what was truly required for success in the industry changed for the better.

Another thing I had been told by friends when they asked what program I was in was that I would forever be known as a “spin doctor.” I hated the idea of serving as the guy in the company looked to for lies and propaganda, and I know that many of my classmates felt the same. It was with a relief that we were immediately told that our role was to maintain honesty and integrity within our organizations, and perhaps my favourite quote of the year was when we were told that we are to “serve as the conscience of an organization.” If I wanted any perception that I had when entering the program in January to be altered, it was that one. Going out into the industry finally, I am ecstatic that it has.

As many of my talented classmates begin to head off to their internships in just over a week, I was fortunate enough to be hired in May as a Technical Communications Specialist at Bombardier Aerospace, where I had interned for three and a half years during my time in university. While I was even more nervous starting this job than I was entering Centennial, the fact that I now had a true semblance of what the industry required made the transition to working life a lot more comfortable. I keep some of my school textbooks at my desk in my office, and have called upon the knowledge that I have picked up this year more times than I can count.

I walked through the door of “Bruce’s class” in January with a distorted perception of what public relations truly was. I will walk out next Friday confident that I learned so much more than I ever expected to, and gained that perception back. I have Centennial’s CCPR program, its faculty, and hopefully some lifelong friends to thank for that.