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
