Mining news and fun with Excel

It is Tuesday morning and I am sitting at my desk and staring at all those emails in my inbox. I know that today will be busy. Actually I think the whole week will be a lot busier than I thought it was going to be the day before. All of a sudden I went from having basically nothing to do to working on five different projects at once. It feels a bit hectic at the start but I love it. I like being busy and I think it is such a great feeling at the end of the day when you can go home and feel like you have accomplished something that day. The second week of my internship has been so interesting. I have had a chance to work on a range of different projects and deal with very different clients.

Reception Desk

Monday of the second week started out very slow and quiet. I finished everything I had left to do from last week early in the morning and had nothing else scheduled for the day. So I decided to send out an email to offer help and remind everyone that I was still here and you know, if you don’t ask then you don’t get. Soon after I had responses to my email and all of a sudden I was busy.


One of the tasks I particularly enjoyed was writing an article for a mining client about their recent discoveries in Brazil. I found it so interesting because I do not have a lot of knowledge or experience in mining and the whole idea of research and the challenge of such task felt intriguing. I ended up spending couple of hours not only researching the client and what they do and what they stand for but also how to write an article about a topic I have basically no previous knowledge in. I found the skills I have learned at Curtin very useful. Especially the ones from Media Relations and PR Evaluation units as they thought me to thoroughly research a client. I also got to use those skills while completing another task of putting together a background information document on people who will be interviewed that was then sent to the client. After completing the article, I received very useful feedback straight away. It was an interesting and challenging task and I definitely look forward to more work like that. Also, it feels good to know that the work that I do over here is actually used and presented to the clients.

Intern Desk

I also got given a task to organise a list of possible people to contact for new publication and some more media releases that I found all very useful in developing my writing skills and improving my ability to research faster and better. Some of the tasks I get given may at first seem a bit mundane but I like to think that there is something to be learned from every task even if that something is just how to become more efficient at creating excel spread sheets – a skill that I believe should be taught more at university. I believe it would be useful if there would be one or two units that would touch on the topic of excel and other Microsoft office programs and maybe help students to understand those programs a bit better since they are used in most offices on daily basis and previous knowledge in them would be useful and would help speed up simple tasks without the need to spend time on learning how to create/operate a spread sheet first. Overall, it has been another week full of learning and I am still very much enjoying the internship.