Let me introduce myself.
My name is Lucie Marchant and I’m a third
year PR and Journalism student.
It’s been a good three years, full of ups
and downs and plenty of opportunities along the way. Most of all, there has
been a hell of a lot of learning.
If you’d asked me three years ago what PR
was, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said it had something to do with
“companies” and “image” and the “media”. Nowadays, I can elaborate a little
more but it’s still a burning question with an unsatisfactory answer.
What is PR? Really, what is it? It’s the
one question that has remained unanswered throughout this degree.
Each term has got me a little step closer. We were given the opportunity to learn about all the activities and techniques involved in PR, we
followed templates and wrote proposals for real and theoretical clients, we
learned about PR in an international context, and we gained an understanding of
how consultancies operated and how practitioners worked in the corporate
setting.
Thinking about it now, it’s true that we
learned a whole lot in those three years. But after each term passed - and I
don’t think I’m unique in that respect - I feel like I still couldn’t put my
finger on what PR really is. What the job actually entails on a day-to-day
basis and what it would feel like to be in a PR role. What is this mysterious
degree leading to?
The answer to the burning question is what
I’m hoping to gain from the PR internship. Surely this one final unit of
working experience will explain everything. We’ll find out very soon…
