Taking responsibility

I’m nearly at the end of my internship with Shine Communications, which I have been working under the lovely Ruth Simpson. When I first started my internship I was very excited to get involved but was also quite nervous when it came to contacting people for an interview, I suppose I didn’t have the confidence yet. When I was given the task to phone someone up, my heart would skip a beat and without prompting, my subconscious brain would come up with a thousand different excuses that my conscious brain would will away and tell me to grow up – it wasn’t a good feeling.

I suppose I was just overthinking things too much, and was too focused on what I had to say and what I had to get out of the interview rather than just being myself and having a normal chat. But luckily for me, this feeling slowly faded away when I realised one crucial thing: the term ‘intern’ is known by most people as someone who is still learning. So, I found that although I was given a lot of responsibility as an intern, the average person knows how much responsibility an ‘intern’ should have, so if I made mistakes, I was forgiven more easily – to say so lightly. If I mumbled my sentence and had to start again, the person on the other line didn’t seam to mind, if I spelt their name wrong or got a date confused, they understood, or if I forgot to attach a document to an email or called them back for a clarification, I didn’t seem too unprofessional because in their eyes I was just an intern who was still learning. Once I had this knowledge in my head, my confidence grew, and the more mumbling and wrong spelling I was picked up on, the more I learned and the more mistakes I began avoiding.

There was this one mistake, however, that was my full responsibility and therefore something I couldn’t blame on my title ‘intern’. I had written a story for the Dogs’ Refuge Home in Shenton Park, which involved a Kallaroo resident adopting a dog. I had been in contact with the resident since day one of writing the story and during the whole process, he was nothing but kind to me over the phone. When it came to asking for a photo to accompany the story, he made it clear that he was very camera shy and repeatedly asked for someone to accompany him when the photographer came to his house. And in response to his pleads, I would reply (numerously) that I would attend the photo shoot and make sure everything runs smoothly for him, of which he was extremely grateful for.

As the date of the photo came closer, I was given more and more tasks to do for the refuge and so, as the day of the Kallaroo photo shoot approached, it became the last thing on my mind and it took until the next morning to realise I had completely missed it. What a feeling that was, I felt TERRIBLE. I immediately contacted my supervisor which she advised for me to call him and appologise – now that was one phone call I was nervous for! Once I had explained to him what had happened, to my surprise, he was very good about it and understood that mistakes do happen. In this case, I couldn’t rely on my title ‘intern’, I think I was just lucky this guy was such a nice and understanding person.

So, things that I have learnt:

- People aren’t so scary to call and talk to on the phone

- People are generally understanding and I shouldn’t be scared of them

- Never break a promise with someone who is relying on you

- Always take responsibility for your own mistakes