"Hi, My Name is Rayna and Blah Blah Blah...?"

After a string of Christmas shopping, back to back (to back) birthdays, textbook buying, and all around spending, it's come to my attention in the past few months that...I've become the typical broke college student.

It turns out I'm not so good at job hunting (Sure, I went and got all these applications- that's work enough, so I think I'll just let them sit on my desk until I feel like filling them out, and what?! They're not hiring anymore??) but after this happened numerous times, I finally forced myself to get an application, fill it out, and turn it in the next day. You can hold your applause.

My job at Penn State Lion Line seems pretty simple; just call Penn State Alumni and chat with them, segueing into a request for not a donation, but a “gift.” I’ve realized that much of my job centers around rhetoric. It isn’t as simple as picking up the phone and saying, “Hi I’m Rayna, wanna give Penn State some money?” Lion Line stresses the importance of being able to connect to your audience--though there is a general gist of what we say to each person, every conversation with every alumni will be different, because they’ll respond in different ways, and we have to use what they say to us to determine the best way to use that to ask for money.

For example, if I ask someone what they studied at Penn State, they might say they studied Psychology, found in the College of Liberal Arts. As a History major, I can respond by saying I’m a Liberal Arts major as well, going off of what I know and like about it (establishing ethos). If the conversation moves onto Penn State overall, I can talk about what a great school Penn State is, and how I love all the opportunities that are offered, and the reason I could come is because I got a scholarship from alumni and am so grateful to them for their generosity (establishing pathos). If this fails to work, I can move on to logos--“Did you know that last year over 70,000 alumni contributed to Penn State, ranking us as the leading university in the number of alumni donors?”

In this sense, rhetoric for my job is really important; from what we choose to say and how we say it to what specific words we should and shouldn’t use. As we learned today in class, our goal is to establish a relationship with our audience, closing the distance between us.