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.

The Hectic Life of a PR Intern

This is almost the end of my first week of internship and I am feeling extremely exhausted! Working in a media company is definitely not an easy task to do, first two days of internship was not that hectic as I was still on the orientation mode. But entering the third day of internship there are heaps of things for me to do, and there is definitely no time to lay back.

In SBO TV I was responsible for two events as mentioned in my previous blog entry, the preparation for the first event ‘Bazaar Ramadhan 2013’ was okay but not for the second event, ‘YMMF’. YMMF is a huge regional event and I was given the responsibility to lobby and follow up with 48 schools across East Java, where this event will start on July 18, 2013. From 48 schools almost half has not confirm that they are available for the event, so every day since July 10, 2013 I spent my day in front of the office computer, fax machine and telephone. For four days I did a data recap on the school list and had to lobby various schools through phone calls.

This was a big challenge for me as back in University I was taught by my tutors that public relations practitioners should be able to communicate effectively with the message receiver. This should not be hard if I lobby the schools face to face, but doing this by phone create a certain degree of challenge that forced me to communicate my self as clearly as possible in order to get my message across and convince the schools to join the YMMF event. Within four days of hard work on sending fax, being on the phone and doing online research of the targeted schools, I managed to get 44 schools confirmed for the event and I came up with a bank data that will help SBO for future events as it comprise of schools contact list.

My work is not yet finished! I still got the Bazaar Ramadhan 2013 event. So for those four days, in the morning I woke up and prepare. I went to work to lobby heaps of schools and in the afternoon around 2pm I went to the Bazaar Ramadhan 2013 event until around 7 to 8 pm. It was definitely not an easy job to do! As the event run daily I work Monday to Saturday full time. 

In my mind I think to myself how tough it is to be a public relations practitioners, because yes it is a 9 to 5 job. But in reality being a public relations practitioner eats more time than how I think it would. So I told myself that for my future public relations career, I have to make sure that I really love the job because not only that it is exhausting but also because it consumes heaps of time.