My first few weeks at WA Water Polo were very eye opening
and interesting, especially when I initially found out that I was going to be
working in a small office that comprised of only two full time staff members. I
was anticipating my internship to be challenging and very stressful due to the
lack of manpower in the office. Dale, the CEO and Tibor, the competition and
development manager helped me to settle into the office and covered the basics
that I needed to know. As there is no dedicated PR practitioner at WA Water
Polo, Dale handles most of the media, communications and PR related tasks. My
first few tasks at the organisation included starting from the basis. I was
involved in creating a Facebook page for WA Water Polo and regularly updating
the page. Also, I began to put together a draft sponsorship proposal that was
to be sent to another department to be further worked upon. The most exciting
task for me was working on a new edition of WA Water Polo’s newsletter, “Top
Corner” that has been out of publication for a few years. It was interesting
process to gather information and do write ups for the newsletter as I learnt
much more about water polo, its players and how the game functions. The creation
of the newsletter definitely put the skills that I learnt in PR Techniques to
the test! Nonetheless, the end product was an informative newsletter with
updates on scores for games and write-ups on current and future events for WA
Water Polo.
As my work experience progressed, I realised that working in
a small organisation with only 2 full time staff members is challenging and
exciting at the same time. The main advantage is that staff members handle
every aspect of running the place by themselves. However, this also poses
several problems as, at times, the work load may be too much to handle and the
staff members are required to complete several different tasks at one go,
including areas out of their expertise. As such, often, additional volunteers are
brought in to help out with certain tasks. Comparing my experience to other
bigger organisations that I have interned with, I realised the main differences
in how they operate and how workload is handled and divided. This made me
anticipate and prepare for my upcoming tasks at WA Water Polo.
