What I Tell Students About Public Interest Communications

Photo: Vitaly Gariev

As an adjunct instructor of public interest communications at the University of Florida, every semester students have asked for my advice about pursuing a career in the field.

I understand and appreciate their questions. The transition from the classroom to the workplace is challenging. The headlines about a tight job market are real and the competition is fierce. But here is what I would like every student to know: I believe public interest communications is one of the most satisfying career paths students can choose.

Public interest communicators use strategic communications grounded in research and science to achieve sustained and positive social change. This is work where the measure of success is whether a polluted area got cleaner, a public policy changed for the better, or people living in difficult circumstances secured a better quality of life. If you are someone who needs to feel that your work connects to something larger than yourself, this career delivers that in a way few jobs can.

A public interest communicator’s contribution may never carry a byline. It may dissolve entirely into the outcome it helped produce. That’s not a tradeoff. That’s the point.

I am also frequently asked why I became a public interest communicator. I came to it through journalism. I didn’t want to keep chronicling the world’s problems. I wanted to help address them. So I took my skills — interviewing, storytelling, translating complex issues for broad audiences — and redirected them toward missions that mattered to me. What followed were decades of work across public health, climate action, disaster response, wilderness protection, and economic development.

For students considering this career path, here’s what I’ve learned over the years that I wish someone had told me earlier.

1. Deep listening is not a soft skill — it is a strategic discipline. You need to understand what a policymaker actually needs to hear and what a community genuinely believes. The quality of that listening determines the success of the communications built on it.

2. Communities are partners, not audiences. Walking into a community with assumptions about the answers to your questions is a communications failure waiting to happen. Participatory communications — genuine collaboration with the people your organization exists to serve — produces both better strategy and more ethical practice.

3. Storytelling carries a responsibility that doesn’t exist in commercial communications in quite the same way. Informed consent, dignity-first framing, giving people meaningful control over their own narratives — these are the foundation of trust between an advocacy organization and the communities it serves.

A final word of advice to students: build your fundamentals in research, writing (without AI), and strategic thinking. Identify the issues you care about most and look for jobs in the organizations addressing them. There isn’t a sector I’ve worked in that I didn’t care about deeply. It’s what this field makes possible.

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Students: I would love to hear what interests you about public interest communications and what may be giving you pause. Please share your answers and any questions in the comments section and I’ll respond.