On the home stretch!

Hello fellow budding PR practioners,

I'm in my final week (second last day) at Rio Tinto and tomorrow I shall say farewell to the laptop, meetings, daily media clippings/analysis, a great work environment and so much more!

My ten weeks here have flown past, so much so that I didn't even realise it was study week at Uni! So after realising that tomorrow I will have to hand in my security pass to get into the Central Park office I've started a mad dash to collect all the internal documents I'll need to help me with building my report. A task I'm sure were all really excited about!

Looking back through my daily journal and the tasks which I have done I'm amazed at how much you can learn in such a short period of time. As mentioned in previous blogs I have sat in on several meetings and a conference call with all head offices (London, Melbourne), I've also helped with the invitations of the Red Dog premier at Cine Fest 2011 - which resulted with 4 free tickets for myself!

Most recently I've spent an entire week of my placement helping with the organisation of 'Team Rio Tinto" for this year's City to Surf. Some tasks include blogging, organising over 1000 employee race packs, logictics of race packs (Which Perth offices need which race packs?) and T-shirt sizes.

Though like many things with the good comes the bad. During my time at Rio Tinto there have been two unfortunate deaths one of a contractor and another more recently of a Rio Tinto employee at mine site, Brockman 2. Sitting within the Communications & External Relations department you really see Crisis Management in practice.
As I'm a small fish in a ridiculously large global pond (Rio Tinto) I only get to observe the how, what, where, who and when's of crisis management but even so you get an amazing glimpse into how what we learn in class is actioned in the real world. This is just one lesson from my time here that I will take with me.

Another lesson I will take with me is my improvement with computer systems and all the behind the scenes actions taken to build a website, create gooogle interest, add links, photos etc. An example is 'Colours of our Country' an event sponsored by Rio Tinto promoting Indigenous Pilabara artists. My task has been to update the external website promotion database, promote the event through external websites and build the Community Investment website with information of the event.
I hadn't heard of the event before and the artwork is amazing! So if anyone is in the city during Sept 19-30 pop into the Central Park Foyer and check it out. For more information click here or here (Some of my efforts of the event's external websites promotion).

There are so many other tasks which I've been apart of but I won't carry on.

If your interested in the Corporate world of PR, especially in mining as WA is famous for it! Leave me a comment and I will do my best to reply!

I hope everyone else's internships are going well so until graduation :)

Ciao,
Ally
Bently Campus - 1428 9576