Hello,
My name is Raina Jagun and I am actually undertaking my
internship at Sedeco Ltd.It is my last semester at Charles Telfair Institute
and I undergoing through a Bcom in Tourism,Hospitality and Events Management
and Public Relations. My first day was interesting since I had a meeting with
the Director of the company, Sandrine Verriez and the Human Resources Manager,
Jenisha Ramma. I was told that they were to be my mentors and all decisions had
to be discussed with them. My advantage and challenge was that I had to deal
alone with Public Relations activities. There is no specific PR department here
thus I was given the freedom to apply all PR techniques learnt throughout my
previous semesters at CTI. They did not hesitate to let me have access to all
necessary information needed for my works but the greatest challenge was to
work in French. Sedeco Ltd is a French company and all my works are to be done
in French. I had to discover back again the French language and my priority
will be to merge both the English and French language in my rapport at the end
of my internship. I was welcomed warmly and the core values of the organisation
were discussed on the first day itself since they focus majorly on their
employees and internal construction. My work will be principally to work on how
to ameliorate the image of Sedeco internally since it is a French company who
already has a good reputation on the French market. I will have to make the
Mauritian market discover this organisation since they have got only French
clients but the priority of the company is their employees. What is interesting with Sedeco is that at
your young age, they give you the opportunity to take decisions, impose ideas
and they take into consideration your efforts and hard work. I am keen to see
the changes and challenges that I will face throughout my internship. I am the
sole PR person in the company and this is a considerable and interesting
challenge to conquer.
Any questions on how the company works and how I am dealing
with my internship are welcomed. Kindly visit the Facebook page of the company
where some of my works will be published.
Kind Regards,
Raina
4 comments:
Hello Raina
While reading your post it reminds me of my own experience at IMS ltd.
Like Sedeco, IMS as well has no PR department and consequently no PR officer. In fact, the PR activities are carried out in the communication department. Therefore, it was a real challenge to be the firm’s PR officer as I had never been subject to such experience. However, my colleagues and supervisor helped me all way through to accomplish my role effectively.
Another similarity is that IMS also encourages the two-way symmetrical communication among its employees in order to develop a good employee relation. I believe this is important to be able to develop the same relationship with clients.
The experience was enriching as I learnt to work independently. Moreover, I was not considered as an intern who only came to watch and see how things work. Conversely, I was treated like a new employee who would use her PR skills to help the organisation reach its goals and objectives successfully.
This approach made me feel part of the organisation right from the beginning.
So, I hope you will enjoy your placement at Sedeco and good luck for the future.
Hello Raina,
I had a similar experience to yours during my internship;
Up to now I studied solely in English during my university years, but during my internship in a Mauritian company I had to adapt to the use of French in the workplace.
The main issue was that even though I speak and use French on a daily basis, I took some time to adapt back to its use in a formal context.
Also, when learning about the different PR tools and techniques during the course of our studies we used English pro-formas, but in this new environment I lost my bearings and had to adjust those back to the current context.
However, from a general perspective it was very enriching since in this field, and multi-cultural/lingual country, we are bound to communicate with people from various backgrounds.
In fact, I believe we should maximise on our ability to speak both French and English because it gives us the ability to communicate more easily, and effectively, with a wider audience.
So I hope your internship allowed you to attune and polish your PR skills, and I wish you the best for your internship!!!
Hello Raina,
While reading your post and others comments, I also wanted to say that I had the same experience of having to write most of the media releases in French.
As previously said by my friends that during our 3 years of Public Relations course we did all our modules in English and thus we were much more at ease with writing and using the English language for our assignments.
But here also at MarCom Co Ltd I had to rediscover the French language as the Communication Assisstant told me that most our newspapers, magazine and other media outlets prefer to have press releases in French and eventually most of the articles we read in the daily newspapers are in the French format. Therefore, I had to adapt myself according to the organisation way of working.
I was also integrated in the communication department of the British American Investment Group and my learning experience there all started with viewing the company profile to acquire knowledge about the various companies under the Group. It was then I realised that working with all these companies and selecting strategies to fit those companies was not an easy task for MarCom Co Ltd.
In fact, I believe that to better communicate with the audience, us as Public Relations students we should be able to adapt with both the English and French language.
Till then Raina your blog post was a really interesting one and gave a really good insight of your work.
Post a Comment