Feature stories and meetings mark the 3/4 milestone

Hi everyone!

I am now 15 days into my internship and since my last blog entry, I have been more involved in the meetings happening at DSR. I really enjoy these as I get to witness what goes on behind the scenes in planning a new initiative and how communications play a huge part in it, such as the Outdoors October initiative. At the Outdoors October meeting, I got to see how they plan out their events, PR strategy and campaigns, social media strategy and media strategy (which I can't disclose much due to the confidentiality).

I also got to participate in the divisional meeting. Since the communications division falls under the policy division, both the communications and policy divisions meet once a month and go around the table to update everyone on what they have been working on. It was really interesting to see how communications integrate everything together (I wish I could elaborate more but can't due to confidentiality once again).

Another thing that also happens once a month is the entire DSR staff meeting. At this meeting, everyone within the department and in their regional offices (via webcam) gets together and hears the latest significant updates. It was a pretty short meeting compared to the weekly team meetings and the monthly divisional meetings.

I also finalised writing and editing the four stories I was assigned to for the Chronicle publication. Through this experience, I got to learn and receive plenty of feedback about writing feature stories, how to make lead paragraphs attractive and how to tailor general news to a specific audience. I also learnt that if somebody is too busy to give a quote, it is best to make one up for them and get their approval.

An ironic thing I experienced was that even though next week will be my last week at the DSR, my orientation training was scheduled last week. It was here where I got to meet two other interns (one from ECU and one from Notre Dame) who were also completing their placements at the DSR but in different divisions. The orientation training also gave me an insight into my second major, Human Resource Management.

I am still doing the media monitoring every time when I come in and over the past few weeks, I have come to appreciate how important it is. At the last communications team meeting, they were discussing new ideas on how to improve media monitoring, especially in regards to effectively monitoring and clipping regional news. 

I am going to be pretty sad when I finish my internship with the DSR. I have been learning so much and got to meet amazing people along the way.

Well, that's all for now! Till next time when I write my final blog post to reflect my final day at DSR!

Michelle