My key roles during the placement was given to me in bullet points at a morning briefing the manager and i had the next morning. During this placement i will be doing these tasks:
- To create a publicity strategy for upcoming-weekly events
- To help advertise the weekly events
- to help Linda (the secratary) with what ever help she needs.
Thank god i am currently taking events management and has had event related work taught to me before. I find the tasks not so challenging because all i had to do was properly come up with publicity strategies for the main events happening in the club every week.
I should know who the events is targeted at; how we can make them want to come to the event; what are our publicity methods and just help advertise it according to my plan.
I also helped created the poster and flyers which kept me busy with events related work rather than just answering the phone and banking in the tills every morning.
The secratary was really helpful, If she sees me without any work to do, she would get me busy with the database which they are struggling to fix. I would have to put them in name orders and year. Being a work addict that i am, i would concentrate on my tasks until they are done, i would finish the stack full of membership folders in 2 hours.
The tasks lasted me 6 days until i panicked thinking that i've been doing a lot of admin work rather than events related work. I thought, this is not a proper organisation to do my internship? this is just a small un-organised organisation that is in lack of a staff member.
The manager at the time was getting ready for a very important board meeting therefore he did not have time for me and i was very scared to approach him so i continued with my 2 events tasks and admin duties.
My worries didn't stop there, i visited our unit coordinator for some advice and her approval of my placement. She was very patient with me as i complained non-stop to her. She told me that i should look at where this placement is taking me therefore stay a little longer.
I then came to realize that i rush into thing a lot. I would get excited at first and think ' yes this is the one for me' or 'WOW i am actually doing it' but then when i keep on a straight path without any big bumpy rocks, i tend to panic and think that i'm not doing good or this organisation has nothing to offer me. I am so used to being challenge and i just have to snap out of it and face the fact that not everything is a roller coaster. Some things are suppose to be boring like admin work, answering the telephone and making excuses for your manager or focusing on a small tasks for a week and just being patient with everything. Well i'm trying to slowly change the way i see things and thanks to our unit coordinator and also Willetton sports club, i am learning quite a bit about events.
2 comments:
I understand what you mean, at my work placement I was not always given PR related tasks but other tasks that seemed more administration focused, but to tell you the truth I was happy doing them too! I mean there is not always going to be PR tasks that an organisation can get a student to do.
The way that I thought of it was even if I am not writing a strategy or organising an event, the database management work or research tasks that was given are giving me the opportunity to find out exactly what my PR placement organisation are working on and who their clients are ect. I also found it very rewarding as often after doing these tasks consultants would come to me and ask me about how something was going as they needed to use what I had done to complete what they were doing.
Therefore I was able to help out from beginning to end and generally I was able to understand and learn from what they had used the information for.
For example, one of my tasks was to find out the percentage of women that worked in the mining industry in Australia and contrast this to the percentage of women working for one of our clients. The figures that I was able to find were then used by one of our consultants to attract various media outlets to run a story about the introduction of a pink dump truck which was being unveiled at Worsley to promote and support breast cancer. The story, which included the figures that I was able to find, was then published in numerous publications.
Hi Zoey,
I think i have failed to explain in details, in my previous post what part of the organisation i am working in. I have been given an event and function role meaning that i don't really do much of public relations work.
I'm sorry for nagging and complaining a lot, I know i shouldn't and i'm sorry. I should look at it from a positive point of view to get the most from the internship.
I thank you so much for your comment and i will try researching more about my organisation to look out for ways i can help.
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