Lessons learned

First of all I have to apologise for the extreme lateness of what is actually only my second blog. There are many reasons for this, including the unbelievable pressure and time shortages of combining studying for three other units and my regular work commitments, as most of you would expect and understand all too well! But the most significant reason for my lack of posts has been the enormous blank white space I see blinking back at me from my computer, without so much as an inkling of what I could write about?

I don’t mean to suggest in anyway that my experience of this professional placement as been bad or worthless whatsoever. I simply mean that I have only undertaken a few tasks over the course of my placement, which has mainly included research and data/spreadsheet work. I have also had the pleasure (!) of writing numerous articles for websites and the company intranet and e-news, which I will say has been a very valuable, though not painless, experience for me.

Although I don’t think I have any kind of talent for writing, and it certainly doesn’t come easy to me, I have always pursued literary studies from primary and high school through to both the degrees I am studying – which include public relations and professional writing majors. I knew that writing was always going to be a primary component of a job in public relations, but boy! was I underestimating just how big, especially in consultancy work.

Writing all of these articles for my internship has taught me that I do need to approach such tasks with less hesitation – as soon as some one asks me to write something, particularly in a non-academic style, I straight away feel brick walls building up in my head and a little voice muttering, “Too hard, it’s too hard…” The less you think about what your going to write and focus more on filling that white space with words, the smaller your headache will be at the end of the day. I always remembered not to be too precious about receiving red comments and edits on my work at the end, but I never bothered to work on my apprehension when actually starting such projects.

In addition to the eye-opening experience of finding the writer in myself, I also managed to obtain what I most wanted out of this placement – finding out what goes on in a consultancy. During my placement I have been able to observe what makes up the day-to-day business of a consultant, which seems to be mostly made up of creating and updating websites for clients, designing and writing e-newsletters and, on the odd occasion, organising events. Naturally this might just be the agency that I have been working for, but nonetheless I am glad to have found out so I am more certain than ever of the direction I’d like to take in my career.