The journey continues

Hi!!! All

It’s my third week doing my internship with PT Foundation, and the journey to the learning environment is still on. This was the most busiest week ever, a lot was being done, more so that on Monday our supervisor was not in the office and the following day my colleague was also not in the office, which means instead of sharing the work among the three of us, we have to divide it into two.

The first thing was to be the middle men between the organisation and the students from University Tunku Abdul Rahman, UTAR, who were to do an assignment interview with our organisation. As the PR person for the company you have to work with the public who at this time were the students and I have to exercise my communication skills to do my work. During this mediating I realize that the company has no guidelines for visitors who want to do the interview at our company and it was very difficult to me to mediate because they was nothing guiding me on what to do, the students were supposed to meet their deadline of their assignments while the we as the organisation we were to make sure that the people who were to be interviewed would be ready and have the required information. I was left with no option but to let students come for the interview and luckily our staffs are always ready to be interviewed. After this I came up the guidelines which would guide everyone who wants to do interview with us. Doing the guidelines for the company was something which needs a lot of time to think so as to avoid any biaseness because if we take sides, is either the organisation fail or our community fail.

Also in this week I was calling the universities like Limkokwing, Sunway and Help which were suggested to be used in the AIDSAware campaign where we are intending to raise 13 000 photo messages to remember the 13 000 Malaysians who died of AIDS ever since late 1980s until 2009. I have to pitch our idea to the universities’ PR person before they can give me their contacts to email the proposal. Pitching is something which I just learned in class in the just ended semester, so it was an easy thing to do as I talking about something which I know the best, all the universities liked the idea and they gave me the emails to send the proposal to them. Here it goes back to communications skills, which means PR practitioners, have to be good communicators so as to convince their audience.

The most demanding thing for this week was to do an interview with our Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) coordinator, Horst Dieter. The interview was supposed to be done in the first week of my placement for the feature article which is supposed to be published in all media partners of PT Foundation, but due to differing free time and other commitments we only managed to do it on Friday. The good thing about this interview was that I ended up testing for HIV for the first time in my life. We all know that one thing for the PR person more especially who are in the PR firm, they have to do a one on one interview for their clients. Feature stories are also the things which we as PR people we write for our organisation.

With this I think by the time I finish my placement here, I would have learned a lot,.

I wish all of you guys in the internship to learn a lot from where you are placed.

Thanks