Like many 18-year-olds, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I started college. There were a multitude of activities I enjoyed, including psychology and the performing arts. At the time, everything seemed so different that I felt unable to find a happy medium.
Paralyzed by choice, I tried to alleviate the pressure by figuring out what I liked most. I knew traveling was my favorite thing to do; however, my university didn’t offer that degree. My next best option: theater.
I chose theater because I loved the performer-audience relationship. It’s a fleeting connection that only lasts during the one-to-two-hour show, but it’s marked by a shared acceptance of suspended disbelief. It is an agreement to try to understand the perspective of someone or something different from oneself.
Beyond the potential to build meaningful connections through the art of storytelling, I also loved that theater allowed me to delve into the mind of a character. I was incredibly interested in transforming words on a page into multidimensional people. It felt like mining for a background story that informed the actions taken in the foreground.
While I continued to hold a deep appreciation for those aspects, at the end of my sophomore year, I concluded that theater wasn’t the major for me.
Instead, I moved on to psychology. It was there that I realized my fascination for character development translated into a broader fascination with the human mind. I spent the rest of my studies engrossed in how people think and why they do what they do. I was enthralled by everything from psychopharmacology to cognitive processing.
One of the topics I found the most interesting was advertising psychology. It was through this that I began to explore how an understanding of psychology can help clients appeal to the public. Advertising wasn’t quite right for me, but the communications field was now on my radar.
This gave me the idea to try out public relations. My first job was incredible — and very LA. I worked in entertainment PR, where I went to events and spent a lot of time interacting with influencers. As wonderful as that experience was, it wasn’t until the summer before graduation that I took my third and final step toward Hoffman.
At 20 years old, I decided I wanted to take more time to travel and learn about PR. This led me down the path of spending the summer interning at a traditional PR agency in London. Working in traditional PR in an international space was eye-opening. I had the opportunity to learn the mechanics of the industry from diverse perspectives. The infusion of a different culture with my own fostered workplace creativity and a well-rounded point of view — two things very important in PR.
That experience taught me that my favorite parts of my two previous endeavors were paramount in public relations. Fostering meaningful connections is just as important with a theater audience as it is with a journalist. In that same vein, understanding why people are interested in a certain product is necessary in both advertising psychology and while brainstorming an angle for a pitch. Most importantly, mining for a story is not just the key in theater and PR, but also one of the taglines of The Hoffman Agency.
Once I realized my values aligned with both PR and Hoffman, becoming an intern was a no-brainer. I had finally found my happy medium. My journey may have been slightly indirect, but in the end, the third time really was the charm.
