First blog entry – Hello from Diabetes WA!

Hey everyone,

I’m In from Bentley Campus. As the title suggest, this is actually my first entry in the PR Reflective Blog. I am looking forward to sharing my internship experience and reading all your exciting blog entries ;)

I am pretty sure that now, everyone is either done with their internship or halfway through, I heard some of you are even done with your report; champions!

I managed to secure an internship with a non-profit organisation, Diabetes WA at the start of the semester. I am fortunate enough that the process of applying for this internship was quite straight forward. I had Diabetes WA as my real life client last semester for PR Consultancy 300, so I contacted my tutor, Katharina Wolf to ask for the public relations officer’s contacts. My current supervisor, Candice Phillips was nice enough to accommodate me for this working experience ;)

First day on the job, I realised how important it is to know your organisation and understand their vision, mission, goals, policies and key objectives, etc. With the existing knowledge I have gained on Diabetes WA from PR Consultancy 300 and my own research, I learn that this knowledge has prepared me well to actually start doing work straight away. However, I realised that my understanding on Diabetes WA are all based on external research. Hence, I was glad when my supervisor gave me a quick introduction on what was going on internally in Diabetes WA. I was grant access to a few documents detailing on the internal structure of the organisation as well to further understand about the organisation I am working for.

Although I was fully equipped with all these information in hand, I then realise that I had made my first mistake as an intern (on the very first day itself!). The most major thing, which is to research on the disease itself completely, slipped my mind. I guess I was too excited to start my internship and get going with my research on the organisation that I totally forgot how important it is to actually know about the disease that the organisation is advocating about before I begin work.

And so my I spent countless hours in office and back home, reading and researching on the disease itself to fully understand the purpose of the organisation. Just a quick run through with you guys; diabetes is a lifelong disease that affects people with high level of sugar in their blood. It can occur to people of any ages and if not managed well, could be a precursor to a bigger health complication like kidney disease, amputation and heart failure. The three major roles of Diabetes WA are; to help prevent, manage and advocate for this disease that affects 7% of all Australians.

I cannot emphasise enough on the importance of this research, especially as a public relations intern where my job encompasses around writing media releases, articles for magazines, etc. It took me a while to understand about the complications of diabetes. Up to till this day, I am still continually reading on hopes to achieve a better insight.

Other than that, for the past month or so, I have been doing different things for Diabetes WA that includes, writing media releases, media monitoring, event planning, etc. I guess I will talk more about what I have been doing in another entry.

So far, I am enjoying my time in Diabetes WA. My supervisor and everyone in the office are friendly and always helpful. I am glad that there is always something that is PR-related for me to do in office.

Hope everyone is enjoying their internship.

Update you guys soon!

In
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