Welcome to My Blog!

Hi, everyone! My name is Julie Stansberry, and I’m about halfway through the public relations master’s program at UT-Knoxville, where I also received my bachelor’s degree in journalism and electronic media. I’ve known I wanted to be a writer of some sort since I was in first grade (yes, my mom saved all my books I wrote… and yes, I went so far as to contract out illustrators for them… yes, in the first grade). I went from wanting to be a reporter to wanting to be a copy editor to taking internships in public relations throughout my undergrad. I’ve worked full time since I graduated UT in 2009, but I’ve just recently decided to focus on the remainder of my master’s program full time while working part time.

I was born and raised in Knoxville, Tenn., and absolutely love it. I think Knoxville is the perfect mix of “city” and “country,” if you will. I have two dogs, Hank and Bella, who are my everything. Well, them and my sweet husband who I’ve been married to for a little over two years now. He’s my middle school sweetheart!

After graduating with my master’s degree, I really hope to work for a non-profit organization or a p.r. agency. Specifically, I’d like to give some type of social networking job a whirl, especially since there’s always something new, and there’s always something to learn. I’m ready to dig deeper into the world of social media and explore quite a bit deeper than what I know on the surface.

I’m really looking forward to this whole blog idea (yes, it’s for a class, but that certainly doesn’t mean I’m not 1,000,000% excited about maintaining it!). I have plenty of ideas flowing through my brain, but I’d really like to take you guys through my life as a lover of “fixing up” my house. My husband and I have been renovating our house for more than a couple years, and we’ve really come a long way. Whether it’s completely tearing down an old deck to build a new one or simply spray painting an old wine bottle (not my idea… we can blame it on Pinterest) for a cheap decoration, they’ve all been things that are turning our house into a home.

I can tell this social media class is going to be very practical and will prepare me for the always changing world of communications out there. My plan is to really concentrate on every aspect of social media that Dr. Childers teaches and pretend as though the assignments are real-world work assignments I’ve been given on the job. And as for the blog? I have no intentions of writing my last blog post when the semester ends. It’s here to stay.