SMU Meadows student Taylor Reed a finalist in National PRWeek Student Of The Year competition

DALLAS (SMU) - Taylor Reed, a sophomore majoring in communication studies at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, is a national finalist in the PRWeek Student of the Year competition.

The winner will be announced at the annual PRWeek Awards dinner and ceremony in New York on March 10. The winning student will be awarded $5,000 and a paid internship at Hill & Knowlton, and the runner-up will be awarded $1,000.  

The Student of the Year competition, sponsored by PRWeek Magazine, was launched in 2000 to encourage bright students to enter the PR profession, and to celebrate creativity and strategic thinking around real-world communications topics. The competition invites undergraduates from any academic area to create a full-fledged communications campaign around a brand or company, which is determined in partnership with the sponsor. The assignment is designed to demonstrate the student’s writing ability, planning skills, strategic approach and creativity.

This year’s assignment was to create a campaign for SanDisk Corporation, the global leader in flash memory cards. The company wanted to target students and encourage them to use the flash cards to capture their college memories. The campaign goals were to drive awareness of SanDisk’s technology in a fun and interactive way, using social media and more traditional PR strategies.

Reed completed the SanDisk campaign as part of required coursework during her Introduction to Public Relations class in fall 2010, taught by Christy Baily-Byers, APR. 

PR Week editors selected five finalists, who were brought to New York in late January to pitch their ideas in person, in front of an expert panel. Reed and Alyssa Vande Leest from the University of Wisconsin-Madison selected as the top two finalists, and will attend the March awards dinner along with top leaders in the industry where they will learn the final results.

The competition website notes that PRWeek Student of the Year winners “have gone on to successful careers in public relations, and have been sought-after employees by some of the top firms in the country. The program is a great proving ground for talent, and also offers marketers and companies a chance to see how they are perceived from a student perspective.”

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