My Junior year her at Bryant I took a course titled “Crisis and Risk Communications”.

It

essentially was a course centered around how businesses, corporations, media conglomerates,

and schools handle crisis situations. This was a particularly interesting time to take this course

because it was during this semester that Bryant experienced a crisis situation of its own. Without

getting buried in the details, Bryant had played host to a few racially charged incidents involving

several students. We had been discussing how organizations handle the flow and spread of

information, and how to appropriately influence perspectives and opinions. We had also

analyzed companies like BP Oil and the Gulf oil spill, the Chipotle E-coli outbreak, and many

others in different sectors and industries.

For our final project we were tasked with creating a crisis response plan for a company or

organization of our choosing. I selected United Airlines for its incident several years ago when

they forced a man off the plane and treated him with brutal unnecessary force. I analyzed the

event, the fallout from the incident, and how United Airlines and its employees treated the crisis.

I found evidence from the crisis event based on information and concepts from the course that

would support my claims that United Airlines did a poor job handling the crisis. I essentially

wrote a communications plan for United Airlines that would have, in my opinion, guided the

company through the storm better than they did on their own. This took deep analytical and

observational learning to determine the best course of action for the company in its Public

Relations campaign. I wrote scripts for the CEO that were better adjusted to the audiences his

messages were addressing, and I demonstrated how various actions and messages would have

more positive impacts for the company.

This project gave me the analytical knowledge and skill to pick apart complex issues and

break it down into its simplest parts. Causalities, impacts, justifications, and motives all play a
role in these events, and many more dimensions as well. Being able to determine the causalities

and impacts of events and situations is extremely useful to any person who cares to have an

educated opinion on current events. This is something that I found to be of high interest to me,

and this project allowed me to go through the steps of a professional communicator.