An intern's last day.

My internship in SBO TV, Surabaya has officially ended. I started the internship on July 8 and finished on July 30.

A lot of things happened during my placement, I faced various crises and had to come up with a quick solution to help my major event to succeed. Throughout my placement managed to secure valuable media contacts, learn and develop various public relations and other business skills.

Throughout my internship I have developed my communication and public speaking skills further, and has learned negotiation and administrative skills. This internship gave me valuable experience on working with big events from clients such as Honda and Yamaha. Being a public relations intern who worked under the event department, SBO TV demanded high focus on details while managing these events.

Specifically throughout my 20 days of internship I was the gatekeeper for the YMMF (Yamaha Mio Music Festival), where I was responsible to organise 48 different event venues and permits. This event is a music and dance competition event sponsored by Yamaha as a partnership with SBO TV. It targets high school students across East Java, and is the biggest music and dance festival in the region. Various Indonesian celebrity debut performances were through this event. 

I was given additional tasks such as doing an impromptu presentation to destined schools on explaining what the event is, as well as being the PIC (person in charge) during the event date in one of the school in Surabaya - SMAN 22. For this event I work in a team of 10 main people, who were in charge of different cities during the event.

The other event, Bazaar Ramadhan was my secondary duty. In this event I was in charge to do a host briefing prior to the start of the event. Overall working in SBO TV was a lot of fun, there are heaps of memories, contacts and valuable experience to treasure.

Other than these events I was  given the opportunity to attend a photo shoot for a "For Hers" section in Jawa Pos. Additionally based on my radio announcer background I was given the opportunity to do a news voice over for a news program in SBO TV, Update Sore. 

On my last day July 30, 2013 I brought a cake to thank all my colleagues, supervisors and managers for their help and assistance during the placement. On the day an unexpected thing happened, as a colleague and a producer approached me. They offer me to be a cast in a television commercial for a furniture company named, SKEV.

On the day I took the job and did the commercial shooting in a shopping centre, SUTOS (Surabaya Town Square).The commercial is a 30 seconds advert that will run for 30 slots in SBO TV. The shooting process took half a day and a raw video on the commercial is attached below. Two days after the shooting, I was contacted by the producer to do another commercial ad for the same company with a different concept. Both advert will be used and aired in SBO TV.

All experiences attained are beyond my expectations, as a public relations intern my expectations for the internship would be to do an office job such as writing media releases and sorting incoming media releases from various companies and organisations. In reality these experiences are more exciting and will be treasured as valuable knowledge that are not attained through merely a university degree.

So the end has come

Hi all,


It has finally come to an end to my internship and a wonderful 4 months it has been. I was allowed to stay on until the end of May as some of the projects i was allowed to handle myself took months to prepare and execute and therefore i needed to be back and forth from Perth and Malaysia in order to complete the tasks assigned to me. I was definitely impressed by the way PR practioners worked in Malaysia and the way they manouvere through the strict policies the Government has in place opened up my eyes to the barriers a PR practioner has to overcome sometimes.

I definitely was able to utilise my writing skills such as speech writing, essay and propsal writing skills as well as producing multiple media releases that has been and will be used for the upcoming events the company will hold later this year. Although the media releases are all prood-read and edited by my supervisor before being handed out, i know that i have done my part and produced work that my supervisor and my lecturers would be proud of.

The frantic pace i had to work at in such a different cultural environment taught me to adapt and change quickly to keep up and prove my worthness in this industry.

I would just like to thank my company and to Curtin for granting me this opportunity to enhance and improve myself for the future and i would hope that i will be able to gain a full time job in the PR industry anywhere around the world.

Regards,
Jun
14041624

A Big Help. .

I know that I have now done one blog too many but I felt like there was so much more to share about my experiences in the 'real world'. 

Following the oZAPP Award Roadshow I checked off another step in the PR plan I established at the beginning of my placement. The 2012 oZAPP Awards is a competition following on from last years WApp Awards. Both competitions have the same concept, however the competition is now national and is open to all states throughout Australia. 

Following the launch of the winning concept from last years awards, I developed a media release and fact sheet and distributed it to all Western Australian media outlets. Tim and Leon, the winners from last years awards, were at the roadshow event and once again I was able to meet the people I had been writing about so often. Their app, the Big Help Mob, is a fun, creative approach to community service, attracting hundreds of people who had never volunteered their time before, to helping out causes throughout WA. The ABC news report on their app can be found here. For more information on the WApp Awards and the winning app click here. 

Official oZAPP's photo: Left to right: Leon Delpech, Bill Tai and Tim Kenworthy

Once the media release was completed and sent out, my next task was to update the national educational institution database and develop an information pack on the awards that could be distributed to all Universities and TAFE's around the state to generate awareness among university students. These information packs included a cover letter, fact sheet, media release, social media links and poster. 

I also had the chance to challenge myself by writing a package for a client. I spent a day researching and developing pages on the company, the experience of the team and the the proposed establishment. This experience taught me that my writing strength is in PR media and plans and it is a lot less natural for me to write documents of this calibre. Throughout my placement I had the chance to work on them twice and my supervisor sat down with me and went over the way she altered them for the client. I learnt that it is definitely a lot harder for me to get this work out but I definitely want to practice and learn how to do it for the future. 

Being my last week the work load was massive as I worked through to have everything completed! I took out the PR plan i developed at the beginning and had a meeting with my boss about the next steps and how the PR could be altered to attract a larger audience. I also had the opportunity to experience the planning, execution and aftermath of a radio interview that took place and how feedback is given to the client, and social media comments responded to. 

The experience working on this event has been amazing! It has taught me that you can't always anticipate the reaction of the media or the public and that sometimes your original plans need to be altered in order to gain greater success. The concept of the awards is incredible and it focuses in on a developing industry, however for some reason the public and media's interaction has been limited and hasn't taken off as anticipated. I have also learnt that every client is different and you have to speak and deal with them in a way that shows them how integral each part of the plan is without undermining them. On top of all these lessons, one of the biggest lessons I had was at our goodbye drinks. The social media coordinator was on Facebook and the alarms went off and within seconds all three people were on the phone and social media responding to the issue. The lesson: there is no weekend for social media and it is essential that you monitor it at all times. PR does not sleep and you never know what can happen out of the office! 

It may be the end of my placement but its not the end of my experiences at 32DSG. I am staying on a day a week to see how the oZAPP Awards pan out and have been assisting here and there, taking on every learning experience that I can!