Practice Makes It All

“Believe me, what you learn at school about a job is only a quarter of what it is in real life.” Newly graduated people often hear this sentence which aims at acting as a precursory immersion in the ‘real’ working world. Theory learning is, of course, essential to the understanding of a profession, but it does not make it all. The internship experience actually confirmed this conception, and was therefore a rich and intensive learning experience. What we learned during the 3 years at University is definitely more than useful, but practice in the ‘real world’ industry provides invaluable insights in the framework of a profession.

By Riccardo Cuppini

As for my personal experience in the public relations field in Mauritius, I learned a lot on the local framework given to the profession. The company for which I worked provides consultancy services in public relations and event management mainly. Therefore I had the chance to work on different projects coming from different types of clients or industries. One of the main insights I gained from my internship is on how media works in Mauritius. Several directions had to be followed when issuing information to the media so as to receive media coverage. The guidelines that I learned from Curtin are essentially influenced by the Australian media environment; therefore I had to adapt my understandings of how to deal with the media to the Mauritian context. For example, I had to translate several media releases, sent by our client Emirates, from English to French to suit the local media companies. Moreover, the format of the media releases was not as per the format that we usually used for our university assignments. I learned how to format a media release according to the Mauritian media context. Another example would be media monitoring activities. At Odysseus Public Relations, media monitoring was done in both offline and online media, and media clippings were essentially done in digital format to suit the clients’ needs. Practice made me relatively conversant with the Mauritian media rules and context.

Interviewing a client and pitching a communication project in real life was also one of the most insightful experiences of my internship. Doing so in an educational context was definitely a valuable formation, but evolving in the ‘real world’ of communication industries added another dimension to the importance of the task. I had the opportunity to interview a Marketing Manager who wanted to create a social media campaign for the company. This invaluable experience weirdly happened to be less stressful than the ones I did at university. Moreover, working on the social media campaign project with a colleague and pitching it to the client were other insightful steps which made me understand more how the public relations profession works. For this particular work experience, I shall reckon that all the communication plans that we did throughout the 3 years at university were of considerable help. Indeed, practice here made it all: both practice at school and at work.

University life is nearly finished, and practice in the ‘real world’ will surely soon turn us into efficient professionals.

Thanks for reading!

Sonia Monty

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