SDSU PAO students earn first-ever Bernays Award

Winning a Bernays Award is a notable achievement in the public relations field, recognizing strong work and professional standards within the industry.

Last summer, the San Diego State University School of Journalism and Media Studies Public Affairs Officer program earned a Student Bernays Mark of Merit Award—the first in the program’s 22-year history. Area head of Public Relations and JMS Graduate Advisor and Military Public Affairs Master’s Program Coordinator Dr. Hongmei Shen said the recognition was especially meaningful for students and faculty alike.

“The local Bernays is like the local Emmy Awards for PR campaigns,” she said. “It’s really a test of the excellence of your agency or PR practitioner, for the quality of work produced. It’s really a good thing to see our students winning this award, especially this year, with both our undergraduate and graduate students' work.”

Over 10 months, students complete a rigorous 30-unit master's program tailored for active, mid-career Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) from the Navy and Marines. To participate in the program, they must be assigned to return to full-time studies and compete with civilians for admission into the graduate program. 

They also bring expertise in the technical aspects of public relations and build on those skills, aiming to develop strategic analytical skills that enable them to plan public affairs programs with measurable outcomes.

As part of the program, students are assigned a project that bridges their military PAO experience and applies it to the civilian world. The client for the project was the Liberty Station X Rock Church’s 7th Annual Military Heroes Festival, hosted at Liberty Station in mid-August.

The event provides military families and veterans with free essentials like groceries and backpacks filled with school supplies in a fun, family-friendly atmosphere. The goal is to ease some financial burden and show a heartfelt thank you from the community for their sacrifices. 

Under the guidance of lecturer Mei Ling Nazar, the students followed the four-step public relations process to develop a comprehensive PR plan for the event.

“They (PAO students) are able to bring their experiences to the project,” Nazar said. “They’re able to share real-world examples of when they’ve had to write a press release on a campaign they’ve worked on. In this case, for the Military Heroes campaign we did, they were able to really pinpoint a lot of the different things the clients needed because they came from that background.”

The first step in the process was to gather qualitative data to establish a baseline from previous years of the event. To do this, the students were divided into two groups: Frontline Communications and MKR.

Using the collected data, the students designed public relations campaigns that address many of the shortcomings they discovered. The plans were to be implemented over 16 weeks leading up to the event, and included mapping outreach strategies, working closer with local media outlets, increased volunteer outreach and more of a focus on the humanity of the event by creating social media content that tells the stories of military families and veterans. 

The students presented their findings to the client, leaving a strong impression of their work. Nazar said it was the most important part of the project.

“I think it was great for them to see and get feedback from the client,” she said. “They were actually able to help change the trajectory of the event with just some great suggestions. Things such as changing a photo of a uniform to a photo of a military family. They made the suggestion that the image should be changed because that uniform sends a different message.” 

Nazar was present at the Bernays award ceremony and couldn’t be prouder of the work the students did to deserve the award.

“They put in so much work, never expecting to win an award,” she said. “For them too, especially to be able to have that as part of their graduate experience to say, hey we worked on this campaign for this real-world client, and not only that, we were able to receive an award from the PR community for our efforts, ' is just something that's amazing.”