Instead of interning at a not-for-profit, consultancy, or an in-house communications or PR department I chose to undertake my internship at a small company that does not have any such departments so to speak. Essentially I am driving the PR initiatives of the organisation on my own, though of course under the eye of my supervisor.
I found myself in this position in a pretty simple way - We Print It Australia is a branch of Printforce Australia, the company I work at during my university breaks.
We Print It, as the name may tell you, is a company that prints (and if necessary helps design and brand) a variety of office marketing materials from business cards and flyers to letterheads and corflutes. If you don't know what a corflute is (and I didn't before I started my internship) it's one of these:
Random fact of the day.
Since I'm working with co-workers that I know well and in an office I'm familiar with I didn't have any of those first day nerves, that's something I'll get to experience at my very first job. Instead my biggest worry has been that I won't be able to find enough opportunities or strategies on my own.
Since We Print It has no PR department, the first couple of days of my internship were spent writing a proposal for my supervisor. I had to investigate which, if any, of the company's current initiatives could be considered PR, narrow down a very broad target audience to more targetable groups, and cement my understanding of positioning and points of differentiation.
The hardest bit, and bit that took by far the longest, was identifying PR opportunities for the company, especially when my supervisor had specified in the printing industry media coverage is not a priority for them.
I was a little bit hesitant with my suggestions in the first draft of the report, but my supervisor has been really enthusiastic and open to a lot of my ideas so I started to make suggestions. Obviously not all of them are viable but at the moment more of them are getting accepted than rejected. It's certainly given me more confidence in my ideas and hopefully that confidence only grows.
Despite my concern that I haven't done enough I have enough of a starting point to satisfy my supervisor right now so I can't wait to get stuck into the Facebook page next week.
It'll certainly be a challenge over the next few weeks keeping myself motivated and self-driven as well as juggling my other three units (especially Capstone) but I'm confident I can get it done.
I hope everyone else is having a placement experience as interesting and challenging as I am,
Elizabeth
