Before you start your Internship… Watch the Karate Kid.

Hey everyone!

I'm  just about half-way through my internship, and this is my first blog entry! I'm excited to share this with you all as I'm sure it will ring true for many of us currently completing our internships.

If you’re not familiar with the Karate Kid, I highly recommend that you watch it! For those of who are familiar with it, you may already know what I'm talking about. If you do, bear with me as I promise I'm not going crazy, there is a point to this!

When Daniel and Mr Miyagi first meet, Daniel is almost certain that he is merely just a slave, aiming to fulfil the purpose of completing Mr Miyagi’s menial tasks such as waxing his car and painting his fence. Promised that Mr Miyagi would take Daniel under his wing and teach him kung-fu, Daniel is yet to see the value in his “menial tasks”. It is later revealed that all those tasks were really the foundations to those important kung-fu moves.

We are always told that there are the "not so glamorous" roles in PR, such as administration duties and the ever important, but equally frustrating, pre- event logistics, but these tasks are crucial in developing a higher level of PR skills- well, in my opinion anyway!

So where am I going with this? As an intern, I myself have often become frustrated with the sometimes “menial tasks” I have been given. Heading into my internship experience I assured myself that these were tasks I would need to complete in order to learn, but when it came to actually doing these tasks- this thought process soon went out the window as I was more interested in asking, “So, when will I be completing the social media strategy?”

After completing a few days of these tasks, I soon had an epiphany. How could I develop a social media strategy or publish important data if I don’t know how to master Excel or even PowerPoint? Embracing this thought, I threw myself into developing my “basic” PR skills, so that once I have confidently mastered these skills, I am ready to take on the next challenge.

In saying all this, I have been incredibly fortunate with my internship experience in that I have been given a few such menial tasks. I am actually grateful that I have been given the opportunity to practice these skills, such as Excel!?, in a real world setting,- because when else am I going to practice using Excel? And thankfully, now that I have “mastered” these important foundation skills, I have been lucky enough to be involved with some really cool projects on campus here at Curtin!

Stay tuned for my next blog, where I discuss exactly what the Place Activation team do here at Curtin. If you already know, let me know what you think it’s all about!