PR major serves community, interns for art exhibit
Senior English and PR major Emmett Munterich spent his summer working as an intern for “the Incorrigibles,” an art exhibit in New York. PHOTO COURTESY OF: Emmett Munterich
Emmett Munterich, a senior double majoring in English and public relations, is nearly finished with his chapter at the University of Rhode Island, but not without taking opportunities to serve his communities in Rhode Island and New York.
As a freshman, Munterich was an engineering major, but despite his love for STEM, he felt that his friends who were public relations majors would be able to do more with their degrees.
“PR [is] a method to do what you want to do, whatever that may be,” Munterich said. “You have these invaluable skills of basically being your own publicist.”
According to him, choosing a major during his freshman year was a difficult task, but he sought to get involved in the community. The first organization he joined was Rotaract Club, a service organization that engages students in local community service, which Munterich said was the perfect fit for him.
“Rotaract is entirely student-run,” he said. “So it gives a lot of agency to the students and new members for what kind of service events we want to do.”
By his second year in Rotaract, Munterich was the treasurer of the organization. Then, as a junior, he was elected as the president of the organization. In his final year, he decided to step down from his role in order to focus on his last semesters before graduating.
While he is less involved with the organization this year, he is proud of the events he was able to be a part of in past semesters. Some of his favorite events he was involved in include the Mews Gear ‘N’ Beer run and the Light the Night fundraiser walk in Providence, which raised money for children with cancer and disabilities, as well as collecting and donating food for the Jonnycake Center and local beach clean-ups.
Over the past three years, Munterich has slowly but surely been figuring out what he wants to do in his life. With his junior year coming to a close, he wanted to know how he could put his PR skills and his leadership skills to use. At this time, he took an opportunity to work for an art exhibit over the summer.
“ I was interning for The Incorrigibles project, which is an art activism project based in Brooklyn, New York,” Munterich said. “Well, they didn’t actually have an internship program, but they said they had a new and big project they were working on over the summer and essentially I created an internship position.”
Munterich said he comes from a creative family, with both of his parents being artists. His mother even happened to have a studio linked to the gallery space where The Incorrigibles were planning to have a show.
While working on the project, he helped design and set the gallery space alongside the director and showrunner and was able to write a press release about the exhibit. Munterich’s press release was published in three different newspapers around the Hudson Valley including The Chester Chronicle, The Warwick Advertiser, and The Photo News.
Munterich has had success with finding experience in helping the community and creating his own opportunities to gain experience in public relations. However, he has professors Peter Covino and Sarah Eron to thank for guiding him and helping him improve his skills as a writer.
As for the future, Munterich enjoyed his work in the art exhibit and would like to remain in that area of writing.
“I’m looking to work at a large established museum,” he said. “I think I could learn from a lot of folks there and then eventually make my way to have my own practice in PR.”
Munterich thought he had his sights set on a certain area of expertise, engineering, as a freshman. However, with time, meeting new individuals, and reflecting on what he truly wanted and how he could accomplish doing so led him to a future in Public Relations.