Who is Hayley Neels?

Hi,

My name is Hayley Neels and I am a senior at The University of Oklahoma. I am majoring in Public Relations with a minor in Communication. I am extremely excited about my degrees I will be fulfilling at The University of Oklahoma because I am a first generation college student.

I was born and raised a Houston Texan, but I hope to move to Austin after I graduate and find a job as an event planner. My hopes as an event planner are very open at the moment. I am willing to do anything within the industry and quickly learn from it, but I have a specific dream of having my own event planning company specifically for big corporate offices. I hope that my company will be a one stop shop for large companies where I have my own vendors for events.

I was not always a Public Relations student. I started college as a Marketing student within

Price Business School at OU. My drive to pursue a Marketing degree was solely based on my mother's experience because she was the Marketing Director at Hewlett-Packard when I was born. She has told me so many great stories from her days as being the Marketing Director and putting on events for HP that I immediately knew this is what I wanted to do.

A lot of pressure is usually put on a first generation college student, but this is what drives and motivates me. I focus on proving people wrong. Both of my parents have been very successful in their careers, but neither one of them went to college. This pushes me to be successful even more because I have had the opportunity to attend a university.

Right after my freshman year of college I was given to opportunity to intern at a company and focused on their social media and event planning strategies within the company. I had the opportunity to work with website creators and learn about advertising and also engagement within social media. This was extremely beneficial to me, but I thrived with planning events for the company. I had the opportunity to plan the first annual "Bring Your Child to Work Day". This event was extremely special to me because growing up I felt like I never knew what my father did and I wanted to help these children learn what their parents do for a living. I utilized Canva throughout planning this event and making different posts to send to the company. I also was able to utilize Canva when I took Intro to PR last semester with Dr. Jensen Moore and I was able to create many different things within my portfolio through Canva. I have a very open mind to learn to create with different tools throughout my journey as a Public Relations student.

I have always been a very creative person and am always learning through different platforms. Canva is my favorite platform at the moment because it is easy to use and if I ever get a creative idea for something I will immediately start working on the idea. Creativity is something that I have and will most likely always be apart of my life. I love to content create and hope that I am able to find a job within this industry.

- Hayley