So Let Me Paint You a Picture...

So let me paint you a bit of a picture: WAM, West Australian music, is an amazing non for profit organisation that is supported by the State Government via the Departments of Culture and Arts. WAM help to build opportunities for WA musicians of all genres and levels of original music, across various avenues of promotion, marketing, public relations, events and programs since 1987. All by the hands, ear, eyes and brains of an amazing team, in which I get the pleasure of observing and interning with weekly.

Why did I choose such a place to carry out my Public Relations internship you may ask? Previous to my study of PR and Events Management at Curtin, I studied at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), as I’ve always had a passion for music in general. When the opportunity to take up an internship came about, I thought, why not fuse both of my passions. I believed that this would help me to develop a deeper understanding for both, PR, events and music. Thus, I began to set my sights on any related business / organisation that had some sort of tie with music, and to my luck was accepted to carry this out at WAM.

The team at WAM are a very unique group of individuals that each have their own style, yet still work together extremely well as a team. I learnt this quickly on day one, rocking up in my professional attire, only to be greeted by everyone in their casual clothes, each with their bit of flair. Casual clothes aside this is definitely not how they operate. Every bit of professionalism is squeezed out via their individual roles.

The two whom I work with the closest handle the PR and Marketing side of WAM. Duties that I’ve had to perform include:

·      Editing and publishing media releases to be published on their website www.wam.org.au under the ‘News’ tab

·      Editing and publishing events information on their website, under their Events’ tab

·      Updating their ENews letter via Mailchimp

·      Taking phone calls

·      Use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and most currently snapchat)

·      Putting together spreadsheets of collated information for future use

·      Research and report writing

·      Image editing

Each job I tackle has at least a template I can look too or previous work I can base it upon. Admittedly, I have struggled with certain jobs and have taken awhile to complete. Strangely enough, the hardest task I have found so far is to squeeze as much information as I can into a 140 character tweet. Who knew?

Each day is carried out with a task completion before moving on to the next and the great thing about it all is, we work as one team, regardless of being an original WAM team member or an intern.

For any PR students out their looking for a place of internship, I highly recommend WAM. The exposure is not only excellent, but they take on numerous amounts of interns each year, so they are experienced in working with interns and delegating tasks in which one can gain PR experience in. You will definitely learn to grow quickly!

- Dharshini
(Curtin University - Bentley)