Hi everyone! My name is Kate Stanke. I hail from Flower Mound, Texas, a suburb about 30 minutes north of Dallas. I’m a sophomore studying Public Relations, a passion that I developed my senior year of high school. While visiting Chicago (where I was born), I got to talking to my mom’s best friend from college, a woman named Lauren Mistretta, who is one of the most genuine and passionate PR professionals that I have ever met. At the time, she was the Co-director of Communications and Public Relations for Deloitte Consulting Company, a job that took her places all over the world such as Madrid, Paris and Sydney, and introduced her to contacts from Edelman, Ogilvy and DBB (just to name a few). After hearing a number of the amazing experiences she gained through her career, I was immediately inspired to choose Pubic Relations as my major.
Even as a sophomore, the experiences I have had in college thus far have done nothing but further solidify that I made the right choice. I am a member of Lindsey + Asp, the student run PR and Advertising firm in Gaylord College, and through that membership have gotten to do real-life PR work with different clients as well as conduct research for the U.S. Navy to create a best practices document for Public Affairs Officers aboard the ship. I am also a part of PRSSA, an organization that allows PR students to mingle and gain skills that PR practitioners use on a daily basis. I am very involved in Make-A-Wish, a wish granting organization that I volunteer for. Even this experience, though not directly related to PR, has given me the necessary skills to speak to others going through difficult times, something that I believe is indispensable to PR professionals. The value of empathy should never be underestimated.
I believe that what motivates me most as a young PR professional is the innate part of me that simply loves interacting and building relationships with people. As a self-professed lover of knowledge, I am always trying to expand my intellectual horizons, and I have found that communicating with people both different and similar to myself has been the most effective way to do so. Another underlying motivation of mine is my inherent passion for the written word. Even as a little five year old girl, I had notebooks full of fictitious stories that I would write, and would often get in trouble for staying up way past my bedtime to finish reading whatever book held my attention at the time (more often than not, it was Harry Potter). Because of this, writing has always been a huge part of who I am, and the fact that writing is an important part of PR makes me even more passionate about my major.
