He d be willing to advise, but he also wanted you to do your own brainstorming and strategizing. You need to be able to think on your own, but you can run ideas by someone who has been there. He made us write a lot of papers and he did emphasize really honing your writing skills. Ellis uses personal, often humorous stories from his days in the newspaper and public relations businesses to get his point across to students. But the war stories can only take you so far, he said.
Students are very quick to see through pretense.
If you re going to presume to teach them to get into your business, you d better know what you re talking about. An army of his former students working in the profession are a testament that Ellis knew exactly what he was talking about. The affection between student and teacher is shared. There s an enormous amount of pride in being able to look at them and say, by God, they re one of ours, he said. While he will be leaving the university, he won t be leaving Reno.