O'Connell brings PR experience to classes
by Helen Clarke
After decades of work in the public relations field, Tracy O'Connell, a 1974 UW-River Falls alumna, returned to her alma mater in 2004 to teach journalism and marketing communications.
O'Connell graduated from UW-RF with bachelor's degrees in journalism, English and sociology and a goal to become an investigative reporter. She said that the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War helped drive her interest in the field.
She later received a master's degree from UW-Stout and a doctorate from UCLA.
"I was a farm kid at heart," O'Connell said of growing up in Newark, N.J. With a love of horses, she said she always wanted one of her own and one of the reasons she decided to attend UW-RF was because she would be able to keep one on campus.
Working for the Student Voice, she was surprised to find she was approached by other students years after graduation who remembered her presence on the campus newpspaper.
O'Connell's first job after college was as editor of the August Area Times in Augusta, Wis.
"My spirit would soar when I was approached by people who thought they had importanat news," O'Connell said of working as editor of a small town paper. "Cars lined up outside my house during deer season to get their pictures taken."
She spent a lot of time selling advertisements, shoveling snow and sitting on city boards with people three times her age. Her husband was an active local politician and O'Connell said she felt like she "shouldn't be writing stories that covered my husband's politics."
It was then that she decided to leave her job as editor and was "grubbing around for 10 years of unemployment and getting paid minimum wage at a bank." Because of an admitted lack of skill in mathematics, O'Connell said she decided to "go over to the dark side" to find a career in public relations.
She found a job at District One Technical Institute (now Chippewa Valley Technical College) in Eau Claire sending out press releases and handling recruitment and donations.
"It was never really my job," she said, adding that the osition was a job share with a woman taking maternity leave.
Seven years later, O'Connell left the college for California, where whe said there were many more job opportunities in the mid-1980s than what she was able to find in Wisconsin.
"I was blessed in California," she said of the 10 years she spent as public relations officer and adjunct professor in the Journalism department at Long Beach City College (LBCC).
She said that she didn't plan to teach, but received a fateful telephone call one day when, three weeks into the semester, the public relations professor quit. O'Connell began her career as an educator at 7 p.m. that day.
However, by the mid-1990s, she said California's budget was suffering and LBCC needed to cut classes.
"They didn't need to pay me to advertise classes that no longer existed," O'Connell said about leaving the school.
A former student contacted O’Connell and offered her a position in the public relations department of Southern California Edison, an energy company. There eight years, she came to mange six people in customer communications and said she “had a blast.”
O'Connell said deregulation of the energy industry opened a lot of opportunities while she worked with Edison, and she was able to be involved with the creation of its new identity while handling five advertising and public relations agencies for different languages.
Deregulation folded in 2001, and O’Connell said she left the company by choice in 2003 because there wasn’t work to do. She took an unpaid leave, thinking that things may change for the industry in the future, while freelance writing in northern California.
“The whole paradigm changed,” she said. “I could have sat in a cubicle and looked busy, but I’m restless and it would be dishonest and wrong.”
One day, O’Connell said she was surfing the web and did a search for UW-RF journalism to get an update on the school she once attended. One of the results was a job application. She attached her resume to an e-mail around Christmas of 2003, did a phone interview, flew to Wisconsin in April of 2004 and began her career at UW-RF at the start of fall semester 2004.
“As a professor, I think Tracy helped give students an idea of what they would really like to do,” said Shalena Brandt, a former student of O’Connell’s Writing for the Mass Media course. “We were able to experience other things than just writing for print.”
Working on the journalism department payroll while teaching marketing communications classes, O’Connell was offered the chance to change departments, enabling the University to hire another instructor for core, news-focused journalism courses.
“With accreditation and the curriculum changes coming out, we needed people with current work experience in the journalism field,” she said. “Although I’m technically in the marketing communications department, I have the same job, and in the same office.”
O’Connel has a plethora of research ideas and oversees a student group that seeks to fund educational opportunities for the journalism department.
She has been a vegetarian for over 20 years and practices tai chi, Zen Buddhism, and enjoys reading.
“Some people are meant for different things, and I’m thrilled to do things on my own,” she said of living in the country ten miles outside of River Falls with her horse, dog, llamas and cats. "I am really delirious with my life."