ASIA-EUROPE INSTITUTE ROAD SHOWS

hello again!
now for sure you know i have been quite busy(posting on post after the other).

Apart from the many seminar series that we have conducted, we have been doing promotional road shows for the AEI's 2010/11 student recruitment.the past three weeks we have been going around schools to promote our master's programmes especially to third year degree students. we started here in university of Malaya , going in different faculties.

first a talk would be given by my supervisor Associate Professor Dr. Hajjah Jariah, who is the Deputy Excutive Director of AEI( Quality Assurence,Promotions and Administration). two of my other colleagues will be registering the students whoattend the talk, and as for me, i will be outside the hall giving students pamphlets and inviting them in.

the attendance at most of our road shows was rather very disappointing, only a few students had turned up. i feel very little was done in letting the students know about the road shows. lack of publicity equals such a low turn up.

honestly i blame my institute for the low attendance, i personally feel that the strategy used is not a very good one, i mean you cant expect a large turn out if you have not extensively advertised the road show. there were no posters whatsoever to let students around school know about these road shows. when i asked one of my senior colleague about it she says they usual send the particular school/ faculty that the road show will be a held at a letter to let them know when they are coming. they(AEI) in turn expect that certain school to disseminate the information. OK fine,that is still a right thing to do but more input has to come from us.

well i am planning on writing a proposal to my supervisor suggesting better ways to get students to apply with the institute, well i hope that the proposal will be taken into consideration once they go through it.

wishing you all well! i am nearing the end of my internship, it has almost two months now!

ASIA-EUROPE INSTITUTE SEMINAR SERIES

hello everyone!how are we keeping up in our work places?

it has been a while since i blogged,well you can imagine how hectic things have been at AEI!

It's that time of the year when students were returning from December vacation so a lot had to be done to prepare for them. since they got back there has been a string of educational seminars presented by different visiting professors from various Asian and European countries.

now seminars need time and hard work to organize. first of all a guest speaker is invited to come and speak at the seminar and getting this guest speaker is not so easy. you need to write in and request for the presence of the speaker, propose a topic for them and wait for their response. once they give a positive responce by confirming that they will indeed come for the seminar then we start inviting students to attend, you would need to let them know well in time. wht we usually do is to email each and every student a memo(lucky enough they are not a large group). also a few posters are put up to inform the students,staff and public about the upcoming seminar. once we are done with invitations we prepare the seminar hall a day before the seminar. we make sure that everything is working and in proper shape. we also make sure that on the day of the seminar a food catering company will deliver the ordered food. as for food, it depends on what time the seminar has started and finishes, if it's a morning affair then breakfast will be provided and if it is an afternoon one then definitely lunch.

organizing events makes a very important part of public relations,call it event management. if one thing goes wrong, everything else might go wrong, so planing events such as seminars requires commitment even though it sounds so simply!

so far all the seminars that have been conducted went smoothly.

i had wanted to share with you a few pictures from the seminar series but when i upload them it messes up the post(mind you i had uploaded them on the last posts which i ended up having to delete because of this problem).

LOOK, LISTEN AND LEARN

The past three weeks i have had to observe carefully the way things are done in the office, i have had to listen attentively to instructions given to me and i have learned!

last week i attended yet another meeting with the school management.This time around the meeting was to give a persuasive talk/presentation to representatives from different countries namely Bangladesh,China,Iran and Indonesia.the purpose of the meeting was to get the officers to sell Asia-Europe Institute(AEI) in their respective countries.It was a thorough detailed presentation on the history of AEI, programmes offered, students enrolled, the staff, visiting professors and scholarships offered by AEI.

my task was to listen and produce a detailed report on the meeting. i simply had to put my listening and writing skills to practice.everyone who knows how to write can produce a piece of writing but not everyone who knows how to write can write professionally.what i mean is that i had to write a professional report. and what is professional writing anyway? by professional writing i mean that i had to produce an impressive report, one that could sell! and yes i did write up the report,well not in one hour.after a couple of drafts and corrections only did i submit this report and guess what, my supervisor termed it 'good work', honestly i was happy with the compliment,i can only hope that in a few years i will be able to produce work that deserves to be termed 'excellent'.

Also the past week i have been assigned to identify top five universities in each of the 43 ASEM countries(made up of Asian and European countries) and identify the relevant authorities to contact in each university/college. now i must say gathering information(you may want to call it research) takes more than commitment, it requires one to be equally patient. i am pretty sure that this task sounds rather as easy as cut and paste but it was not a very quick and easy job for me. this is because in some cases different websites ranked the universities/colleges differently, say in one website Oxford University will be top of charts and in another not,also some school websites did not have contact details so you can imagine!but in any case i still had to get all the contacts details, next is to communicate with the universities!now communication is going to be easy now that there is information.

remember the secret lies in looking(observation), listening and you will learn.

TOKEN OF APPRECIATION OR NOT?

i was having a debate with one of my friends!well the topic of discussion was that "public relations practitioners seem to bribe media people with presents especially during celebrations". i was against the motion, trying to raise some important points as a public relations student but my friend(not a PR student) on the other hand couldn't understand why PR personnel give out goody bags,send seasons greetings cards and invitations to parties etc. she sees this as a deceptive motive by Public relations people to get the media to be on their side.she(my friend) further argued that 'if at all these small gifts are given as a token of apreciation,do the PR people also receive these "little presents" from the media people' .well i tried to get her to understand that PR people work with the media almost on a daily basis therefore they must have and maintain a good relationship with the media thereby showing appreciation. i mean without the media, PR would almost seem hopeless, how else would we disseminate information about our companies/client's campaigns and projects to large masses of people?what i am trying to say is that the word BRIBE fits rather wrongly on the topic at hand but APPRECIATION will do.speaking of appreciation, last week i was preparing seasons greetings cards to be sent out to more than 200 companies and universities,(local and abroad) and of course the media to wish them well for the new season and show our appreciation .

i was very excited about preparing and sending out the cards, it was fun though time consuming.the cards were already designed and printed by the publisher, all i had to do was to fold them nicely and dicard those which were not in good shape.once i finished folding the cards i had to carefully stamp each of the cards with the Directors signature.next i had to type and print addresses on envelopes, honestly i couldn't find a faster way to do this, mind you well over two hundred cards had to be sent out and that meant over two hundred envelopes had to be typed and printed.once i was done printing the envelopes, it was time to insert the cards and get them ready for the post people to collect them.at the end of the day my supervisor was impressed with my work.

anyway, i would like to hear what you guys think about PR practitioners sending out tokens of appreciation, be it christmas(or any other ocassion) presents,cards or goody bags.should this really be considered as a bribe of some sort?what difference will it make if these were not sent out, would the media not cover 'us'?

Asia-Europe Institute, university of Malaya

good day good people!
hope you are all doing great in your work places!

This is my first post and i started my internship last week at Asia-Europe Institute(AEI), University of Malaya . AEI is a post graduate institute working in partnership with reputable Asian and european universities.

so far i have not done much(today is my 5th day). on my first day i was shown around the office and introduced to the rest of the staff, i must say i was nervous the whole day,can you imagine being around people older than you,seing them for the first time and all,you just don't know what to say. the second day i felt alot comfortable, i attended a meting with the school management team, the agenda was to discuss and draw a 2010 year plan, the meeting ran for almost the whole day,i was taking notes where i could understand(mind you the meeting was conducted in bahasa melayu,a laguage foreign to me). so far that is my number one challenge(language), because almost every document is written in Bahasa and later translated to english!i am surely killing two birds with one stone,learning bahasa and practising pr,lovely.

this week i have been assigned to write and send letters/emails to various institutions to invite students to apply for masters and PhD programmes.therefore i have to research and read extensively about AEI before i can start writting. i think i am going to enjoy my time here.
by the way to those of you who are interested in doing masters,check out this website http://aei.um.edu.my. (i am only doing my job)!