Hi everyone. I am Raiyana and I am a final semester student in Curtin Sarawak. I am not really sure if it was a fortunate or unfortunate turn of events in my life that led me to do two internship to complete my PR 393 unit. My 1st and my major internship I would say took place in Kuala Lumpur. I did it with an international PR Firm called Fleishman Hillard.
In my opinion it was a fancy work place with extremely friendly workforce. In fact i would say i was actually blessed to have such a friendly and helpful supervisor. I will be very honest I was completely paranoid about my internship. Being an international I was not aware of the local media or even the commonly used language that is Bahasa Malay or Chinese hence I thought I would be quite bad at my work and they may not accept me easily. However, it was nothing like that, my supervisor and my fellow interns helped me a lot to understand how the Malaysian media works, how to approach them when you are calling them for media updating or stuff like that. Funny thing is towards the end of my internship i have learned the Malaysian way of speaking English.
One thing that I have learnt from this Internship is that it is very important for PR people to maintain a very good relationship with the reporters and journalists. Even if some of them are quite annoying but for the sake of your clients you should always be nice to them and talk to them with a big smile on your face. There has been one or two occasions when i came across angry reporters on the phone but as I was taught I tried my best to be as nice as possible.
From my small experience I can say that it is a very tough industry to survive in. Other than being super nice to the media people, you will also have to be nice to your clients and give your best to fulfill their demands and you should be ready to work long hours and sacrifice some of your weekends. However, at the end of the day when you open the newspaper and see your press release or nation wide event or campaign takes place and you realize you had something to do with it; you will definitely feel accomplished. And that is something I look forward to happen to me in future.
Until next time this Raiyana :)
In my opinion it was a fancy work place with extremely friendly workforce. In fact i would say i was actually blessed to have such a friendly and helpful supervisor. I will be very honest I was completely paranoid about my internship. Being an international I was not aware of the local media or even the commonly used language that is Bahasa Malay or Chinese hence I thought I would be quite bad at my work and they may not accept me easily. However, it was nothing like that, my supervisor and my fellow interns helped me a lot to understand how the Malaysian media works, how to approach them when you are calling them for media updating or stuff like that. Funny thing is towards the end of my internship i have learned the Malaysian way of speaking English.
One thing that I have learnt from this Internship is that it is very important for PR people to maintain a very good relationship with the reporters and journalists. Even if some of them are quite annoying but for the sake of your clients you should always be nice to them and talk to them with a big smile on your face. There has been one or two occasions when i came across angry reporters on the phone but as I was taught I tried my best to be as nice as possible.
From my small experience I can say that it is a very tough industry to survive in. Other than being super nice to the media people, you will also have to be nice to your clients and give your best to fulfill their demands and you should be ready to work long hours and sacrifice some of your weekends. However, at the end of the day when you open the newspaper and see your press release or nation wide event or campaign takes place and you realize you had something to do with it; you will definitely feel accomplished. And that is something I look forward to happen to me in future.
Until next time this Raiyana :)
1 comment:
Hi Raiyana!
I can totally relate to your experience. I did my internship in Kuala Lumpur as well. My experience taught me the importance of having and maintaining good relations with the media. They can be very moody indeed! I think perhaps this is the case only in Malaysia, not other places, what do you think?
hope you had a great time at FH :)
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