Most people think of PR as an episode of Sex and the City. Maybe this is the case if you’re a 20 year veteran to the industry but starting off, not so much. There are aspects that are a lot of fun, but PR is a career that you have to work your way up which means starting at the bottom of a barrel full of mundane tasks. For me, these ranged from Library and IT support where I had to search for and scan in pages of articles published about Hames Sharley from various magazines, crop hundreds staff images in Photoshop for the email facial recognition database and create project sheet after project sheet.
For those of you that don’t know, project sheets are an A4 page including project content and images created with InDesign displaying each project Hames Sharley has ever worked on. Needless to say there are a lot. At first it was fantastic and necessary working with InDesign as I had no prior experience but then after around the 50th project sheet, it started getting repetitive.
However, these were beginner’s tasks and I was soon thrown into press releases, writing articles for publication, external client newsletter (IntheNews), the internal staff eNewsletter, competitor analysis and website updates. My knowledge has grown exponentially in a range of tasks that I greatly value. My last day as an intern, I got to work on a submission which is a very important document determining whether or not the organization is chosen for a contract to a project. I was honored to be chosen and for the responsibility it entailed.
The most exciting thing for me was to see the project sheets for the WA Institute for Medical Research and Fiona Stanley Hospital (which can be seen from the freeway near Murdoch train station) come to life. Bravely I asked if Bec and myself would ever be able to do site visits to get a feel for current projects we were writing content for. My bravery was rewarded and the next week we set off to the construction sites. It really put everything into perspective. We could see the sheer size of the project and how much coordination it took to get all aspects working together and to a tight schedule. Even the smallest change in a design or subcontract with an electrician etc could mean added months to the estimated completion time. It was also great just to get out of the office for a few hours.
