I've experienced a little bit of everything working my
internship at We Print It and I'm only half way through it. I've multitasked
reception duty and managing the planning of Facebook content, I've had a screen
of account processing and another composing an internal communication memo open
at the same time. Unsurprisingly the most common multitasking situation I've
found myself is that of scanning. More than once over the course of my three
weeks here I've started scanning a document or two for my own work thinking it
would take 5 minutes then found myself still scanning an hour later as every
man and his dog had found a handful of vital documents that needed scanning,
and since I "already had the scanner set up" would I please do it for
them?
Working for a small company where I'm primarily driving the
PR initiatives by myself and I have very little budget is far from the fast
paced, multi-tasking environment that so many of my peers seem to be interning
in. Days like today though where illness sweeping the office and it's a bit of
all hands on every deck give me a tiny, tiny glimpse of what that's potentially
like. I have a lot of respect for everyone who manages it.
Marketing and PR are so integrated that often it’s hard to
tell where one starts and the other stops especially in a small business
context. Multiple times over the course of my internship I’ve done tasks I know
are actually marketing tasks, especially in planning of Facebook posts. Whilst
this isn’t exactly news to me, tutors have told us over the course of our
degrees smaller organisations often integrate the two functions; it’s been
interesting to see it in action. I’ve also had to be careful to make sure that
I’m not getting to distracted by the marketing side of things after all this is
a Public Relations Internship.
The final challenge I’ve had to face is communication with
my supervisor. For a large portion of my Internship my supervisor has actually
been in the Sydney or Melbourne offices due to both regular schedules and
unforeseen complications. Because of this majority of my communication with my supervisor has been over the phone or through emails. Though communication through email is something that's obviously very common in this day and age, it can sometimes be frustrating when I've emailed something for approval that won't come until the next day because of meeting or time differences.
Of course don't think I'm complaining, my Internship so far has been a rewarding experience and these challenges have all been an amazing learning
experience, and quite an eye opener. The “Real World” is a lot messier and less
structured than our classes and assignments.
So I put a question to you, what’s been the most challenging
part of your internship? Was it something you were expecting or not?
Until next time,
Elizabeth
