I know that sounds unbelievable, but it is true. This internship is my first job in my life. I was quite worry about that I cannot find a placement before I took PR393. Because I am holding a student pass in Singapore and Singapore government doesn’t allow company use foreign students. But luckily I found one PR Company in the end. My internship company is focusing on PR & Marketing. And basically my company is helping some clients to do some events, contacting the Singapore media, finding sponsorship, and also give out a PR plan.
My job title is community consultancy and my job is as below:
- Contributing to PR plans
- Giving out some PR & Marketing ideas to our clients
- Attending and contributing to a client meeting
- Arranging the meeting date for my boss and clients
- Answering a call in phone
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To be honest with you, I felt very nervous at the beginning. Because I really don’t know what kind of tasks I need to do and whether I can handle it. Luckily, my boss and my colleagues treated me very good and taught me how to handle some problems.
Although my company is not a big company, most of our clients are from big organizations. So I need to collect different kinds of information in order to understand my client better. Such as IT information, Arts information, even Famous food place. That sounds interesting, right? Sometimes you will feel very busy and a little bit confusing. But I am getting used to it.
PR job is not as easy as you think. Because you never know what will happen next second. That’s why I choose PR major. You can meet different types of people and learn different things from themselves.
Cheers,
Karen Zhang
5 comments:
Hi Karen
I'm a Singaporean too, except that I'm doing my job placement in Perth. It is interesting to note that in the fast paced life of Singapore, there are still many similarities compared with working in Perth. Working for your first employer in a foreign country certainly can be nerve-wrecking! Good luck in your job placement and any upcoming events that you might be involved in.
Jack
Don't worry, Karen. You are not the only one with the PR 393 placement as your real first work experience in life. Although I had a previous work experience as a part-time teacher in a kindergarten school back in my hometown in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, East Malaysia in 2005, it is not considered as a "real job" kind of thing.
Previously, I struggled to find a placement in Perth and it didn't turn well. For me, doing my PR 393 placement in a five-star Shangri-La hotel in my hometown was something totally new to me. I faced similar situations as you. For me, I did not know what to do for the first time in hotel office environment because it was totally different from my teacher work experience. It was more PR departmental administration than face-on with young children of different personalities.
My work supervisor and work placement's human resources department head commented that it usually take minimum of 3 months for interns to fully fit in busy work environments.
I agree that PR is not an easy job. We can always expect PR tasks to be the expected perfect good jobs we done. At times, things just turned to be unexpected of the PR tasks we performed. We will never ever know what would happen next. The unexpected referred to disappointments and flops of performing PR tasks.
Doing PR had many of its own responsibilities. From writing media releases, communicating with clients and researching information to event management. They are such big responsibilities that required lots of practice and time management That was why working as a team is much easier comparing to working alone.
The cool thing gained I believe is meeting and learning from different people with different personalities and previous work experiences.
You've made it this far. Strive. You can do it!
Hello Karen,
I've been through the same experience as you. I took nearly a month to find an appropriate PR placement. It was quite difficult at start as there were no responses from the companies where I applied for internship.
In Mauritius, the PR field is still unknown and I got some difficulties to find companies who have PR departments as many of them do have only Marketing departments.
Gradually, this field is emerging and at the end I was compensated when I got two replies from two companies. I was also afraid as it was my second work experience and the PR work experiience was still new to me.
I never world involved in CSR and I took nealy three weeks to really get used to my work experience. As an intern, at first I had some apprehensions like being in a new work environment especially that the company where I am working belongs to a group of companies.
What I like with PR is that PR offers you a variety of professional skills and I find this aspect very interesting. I totally agree with Christie Ann point of view and things can be unexpected.
In one sense, PR involves having different responsibilites at the same time. My job is more towards communication but at the same time I am involved in CSR and in community relations.
I wish you good luck for your placement and make the most of it!
Sandrine
Hi Karen,
It sounds like you had a pretty scary first few days not knowing what to expect, and it being your first real job.
I had only ever worked in a retail environment before I took my placement and so I was very nervous about how to handle an office type job.
Although there were a huge amount of differences, I felt that what I had learnt at uni and in my retail career really helped me handle a lot of the tasks and situations I faced.
Retail is all about customer service and that helped me to handle conversations with members and sponsors with confidence as I had learnt certain 'people skills.'
Also, when you are working with a group of helpful and friendly staff/collegues, it makes it a million times easier to get on with the tasks you are faced with as you are not scared to ask for help and so you don't end up making too many mistakes.
I hope you are settled in now and enjoying the working life!
Carly
Hi Karen, this is also my first job ever ! I really did not know what to do, working full time 9-5 everyday! but it was quite fun and i learned so much in my internship.
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