A hindsight perspective on being an intern ....

If only I knew then what I know now...

Hello all,

Having completed my internship, I am beginning to reflect on my experiences and the insights gained during the past few months I spent at the Perth office for Kreab- a consultancy based in strategic communications.

 In doing so, I have been thinking about what I knew before my internship commenced and what I know now and thought- if only I could have looked into the future and known how my internship was going to unfold.

So this is what I would tell myself if I could go back in time to the fresh faced university student who was about to commence as an intern , who would soon have her world open up new opportunities in an instant.

So it’s finally time to get a taste of the real world. Feel what it is like to experience first hand a Public Relations environment, and more specifically, what it is like to intern at a consultancy.

You've researched the company you will be interning with, but let me assure you, reading about them will teach you nothing until you begin your first assigned task on day one of interning. You will worry about every possible scenario in your head during that first walk from the city train station into the office on your first day.

 Those 15 minutes or so will feel like a lifetime and you will feel like a small fish out of water among a big pond of corporate workers, all strutting along in a hurry with their morning coffees in hand and heels clicking along the footpath as you walk as fast as you can despite being early. After a few weeks, let me assure you, you will fit in perfectly among the masses, you will hold your head up high and have a spring in your step every day until you finish.

You will be welcomed by your super friendly fellow workers and you will learn from day dot to be confident, ask questions and more importantly- attempt every task to the best of your ability. The Perth office you are working for will provide you with the upmost support in both your professional dealings and in terms of making you feel most welcome and a strong part of the team.

They want you to succeed and their knowledge, expertise and positivity will make you believe in yourself more than ever. 

You will be forever grateful for their support, guidance and encouragement and you will recognise this nearing the end of your internship and it will give you the reinforcement to go forth with your abilities and creativity. 

You will sit in on a real meeting with a client and then write many media releases and an event proposal for that client. 

You will become aware of who the company engages with and will become accustomed to what various clients want. It may be challenging at times but you will welcome every task with the same amount of enthusiasm as your previous piece of work. 

You will expand your knowledge of current economic, social and political change and learn that to be a good PR professional you need a firm grasp of the media and political landscape. 

There will be days where you feel as though you have writer’s block or are lacking creative firepower and you will learn that this is perfectly normal and happens to the best of us.

You will attentively listen in during all weekly update meetings and feel bewildered at times with the work to be done in coming weeks, but you will also feel a sense of faith knowing your team always seem to have a positive frame of mind and reassuring outlook on even the most daunting consecutive days of deadlines!

You will sense a feeling of reward after you help out with your first ever event and capture the moments in photos. This event will require you to venture with a colleague to an area you have never and probably will never visit again. An area filled with cattle, horses and farmland.

You will walk into the office one day and be assigned the task of drafting an event strategy and by using techniques learnt from your course, you will complete it and see yourself imagining the event unfold as you go to sleep that night.

You will become more equipped to understanding PR on a national and global scale and all of a sudden you will be constantly curious for information. 

Every article you read you will relate back to the current PR landscape. 

Every representative or government person you see being interviewed on TV you will question if they had media training and are actually comfortable in front of the camera and will wonder what messages they are trying to get across. 

Every sign you see you will wonder how the company wants to be branded and what they represent.

Your hunger for information and answers will grow throughout your internship and your eyes will be that little bit more open to the world by the time you finish.

Don’t take for granted the time or the tasks you have been given. Some tasks you will feel less inspired to complete, but if you keep working hard, the reward will be worth it.

By the time your internship is over you will not feel ready to leave- you have been made to feel part of the Perth Kreab team and you've learnt so much within a short period of time .

However,  you will feel ready to tackle your next mission, all which lies in the unknown realms of post graduation life.

Take all of this into account and don't see your internship as the last hurdle before graduating and starting the next chapter of your life, but rather see it as the first step to your post uni life- and that chapter will come around quicker than you can imagine.

Until next time,

Maddie

One Day of Positivity

Hi everyone, I’m Jaimie and I will be completing my internship at the Australian Education and Leadership Centre apart of the One Day of Positivity Campaign Team.

My first day was very exciting and I loved dressing up in a corporate outfit.

To start of the day we met the other interns and got to know everyone around the office, we set up our own email accounts as well as learning how to use the photo copier and binding and laminating machines, which will come in handy later on in life.

As this was the first year of the campaign on the first day it was already our job to start spreading the word and we were linked to the Facebook page and began inviting everyone to like our page that was filled with interesting facts about positivity, inspirational quotes, details about the campaign and a percentage of the news that week that was negative or positive.

Our campaign manager Jess knew that a part of the campaign was going to be a family friendly treasure hunt, so we call began googling some ideas and found out that a catching treasure hunt was temporarily in place and one clue was near the office, so we set off to the east Perth train station and as a team looked for this clue but were unable to find it.

The next couple of days were also exciting as me and my team member Kristal began to write out events plan and everything that we needed to be aware of to make this campaign a success also focusing on crisis management.

I then interviewed Tracey about what the campaign was all about and wrote a feature article for the FIFO magazine about the one day of positivity.