First Post - Gabrielle, Curtin Bentley, 1 Aug 2011

Hi everyone,

My name is Gabrielle Martelli and I am from Curtin Bentley (WA, Australia). Although I have completed 11 days work experience so far, I have just been given access to the blog so this is my first post! I am doing my internship at Presbyterian Ladies' College. PLC has a very large community relations (PR) department and I jumped at the chance to gain work experience here.

About Presbyterian Ladies' College:

Learning about PLC and the history of the college has been an integral part of my internship. As with any PR job, you must have a general knowledge of the history of the corporation you are working with in order to carry out your duties effectively.

PLC was founded in 1915 and today is a Pre-Kindergarten to Year 12 day and boarding school. PLC has a wide mix of cultural backgrounds with many indigenous and overseas students. The majority of PLC's students are tertiary bound and PLC is one if the few schools in WA offering the International Baccalaureate.

My first day:

On my first day I met Chavaune Francis, the Director of Community Relations and Colette James, her colleague and my supervisor. Colette introduced me to the community relations office and then gave me a tour of the school and introduced me to most other staff members that I would be liaising with on a regular basis. The office is an open plan design, it is very modern and spacious and is brand new. Unlike the rest of the school that is filled with the school's tartan check pattern and school crests and photos, the community relations office is very plain and stark. Colette informed me of the very strict rules in the office. These include: no eating in the office, you must answer other colleagues phone calls if they are out of the office and there must be two or more people left in the office at all times.

My duties:

Colette, my supervisor works at PLC as the alumni co-ordinator. Colette is in charge of all major school events and reunions. As the school had just finished sending off their quarterly newsletter titled Blackwatch, most of my duties for the remainder of the internship were to be event planning and co-ordination. I was given an event to look after from start to finish - Founder's day. So far, I have really enjoyed the event planning part of my internship and I have used many PR skills gained at Curtin to assist me in this. Some of my event planning duties included: making a detailed event plan, forming checklists, delegating tasks, creating invitations, organising flowers/centrepieces, creating a menu and making service order booklets. Along with the interesting parts of event planning in my internship I have also completed a few boring secretarial tasks such as sorting through mail, sealing envelopes and data entry.

My next post...

In my next post, look out for a hilarious meeting I had with old PLC collegians, a piece published in the local newspaper and some media monitoring (where I came across some not-so-great reports of PLC!).

Thanks for reading!

Gabby Martelli