Challenges of an Intern

Hi all,
As mentioned in my previous blog post, I really enjoyed my internship at Beyond Communications. Even though my experience has been a really positive one, this blog post will dwell on the few challenges I've been dealing with.

The first one being the clash between what I thought it would be like to work in a PR company and the reality. Ever since I'm studying Public Relations, we have been asked to work on fictional tasks and clients which I thought I did a pretty below average job but it turned out that my boss and peers considered my work as 'good' and it was somehow difficult to grasp at the beginning.

The work load was not that difficult, I was asked to either do a translation, or help in writing a draft of a media release among other things and from my experience so far, it is way more easy to deal with real life clients. As a matter of fact, I was lucky enough to meet a new client, go back to the office and talk about a strategy that we could put forward to help her out and it was a gratifying process.
I gained in confidence which only helped in improving my skills. Not to be cliche here but I know did my very best and worked hard, was pro-active.

The second point that I would like to stress on is Social Media. Beyond Communications is without doubt a Public Relations company and they are very good at Social Networking. Indeed it is a Public Relations tool but to be honest, as an intern it was probably the most boring and time consuming task I had to undergo. The image of our clients is important and the on-going communication between our clients and their clients even more. So even though it was not my favorite activity, I have spent a descent amount of time looking for images and articles to post on the Facebook accounts of our clients.

Finally, research must have been THE most time consuming activity I have done at Beyond Communications. It could be about the peak hours for Facebook Posts, on LinkedIn or about the best team building companies for one of our clients.. These sometimes took days, a constant communication with the concerned persons, either on mail or other the phone. And when the research has been done and proofread and when your boss send you a mail thanking you and congratulating you on your hard work and in-depth research, there's no need to pretend you are not proud of yourself.

Until the next blog post.

Emilie Joelle Benoit.
Intern at Beyond Communications.