Good Afternoon Fellow Budding Interns,
So I have been interning at Lion’s Eye Institute (LEI)
for over five weeks now and have completed just over ten days. Wow that time really has gone fast. It feels
just like yesterday when I was stressing out to about my first day at LEI as
the rookie. I felt as though the weight of the universe was resting on my
shoulders and that if I let my supervisor down, that was it for my future and
career aspirations. A little dramatic, I know, but at the time it was very
real.
Anyway, now that a good amount of time has passed, I feel
I have started to really grow into my role as an intern, and am really valuing
the experience. I personally have a passion for writing, it’s why I entered the
field of Public relations; so whenever I am given a written task to do I am more
than happy to take it on and finish it in the knick of
time because I love it that much. Some
of my other tasks so far have been help revise and edit the end of financial
year tax appeal letter, write two draft media releases and write a staff
newsletter(which I will not go into due to respecting LEI's confidentiality).
One thing I love about my internship is that as a public
relations intern, you get to learn about the organization and about facts you
wouldn’t normally know. Since LEI is an eye health/medical research
institution, I have learnt so much about the eye, blindness and other eye
diseases that I would have never learnt if I didn’t intern here at Lions Eye
Institute. One of my first jobs here at
LEI was assisting in writing a tax appeal letter as the end of financial year
is arriving. The tax appeal letter was centred around the growing issue of
Glaucoma, which is the name given to a group of eye diseases in which the optic
nerve at the back of the eye is slowly destroyed. Glaucoma is the leading cause
of irreversible blindness and is sadly genetic and cannot be identified unless
tested for. The common label for this
eye disease is, ‘The Sneak Thief of Sight’ which is appropriate due to its nature
of being invisible until diagnosed or if it’s too late. I would have never learnt all this without my
exposure to being a part of the end of financial year tax appeal letter.
My supervisor found that the original tax appeal letter
very boring, it lacked flavour and appeal.
So she gave me the tax appeal letter and asked me to work with this as a
base but to make a much more interesting version. The first thing that popped up in front of my
eyes was the ‘The Sneak Thief of Sight’, I was like wow that’s an interesting,
catchy phrase, let’s play it up and use it as the underlining theme of the tax
appeal letter.
The media relations officer who lives in the country and
works off campus had a phone call meeting with me and she discussed the
possibility of me writing two draft media releases, one being about a new high
tech camera that LEI acquired, this camera is the first of its kind in Western
Australia , images taken with this device reveal
astonishing details of cones, nerve fiber bundles, microscopic capillaries, and
the lamina cribrosa. The camera allows the picturing of retinal cells and structures
that are invisible using standard imaging technologies including Optical
Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO). This
camera will be used by the Retinal imaging department. The second media release
was to be about LEI’s rural branch labelled “OUTBACK VISION” receiving an award
for outstanding medical contributions to rural and remote communities.
Although I love writing, I am very aware that my media
release writing is probably my weakest of all the public relations tools and am
grateful for the opportunity to sharpen this skill in a practical setting and
get feedback from a practicing media relations officer.
As I sat there with the daunting task of writing two
media releases, it slowly became a reality that this task will really determine how my supervisor's and colleagues’ view my public relations capacity. So
after relaxing my nerves and several attempts of getting into the zone, I was
ready to write my first media release about the high tech camera. I started to
imagine the inverted pyramid which was taught to us numerous times at uni, and
so I began my writing.
So far the writing opportunities I have been given have
further strengthened my love for writing and have also made my pathway in
public relations clearer- I want to work in media relations and eventually
government relations/public affairs.
Keep you posted,
Thank you and kind regards,
Krithika
(15513140, Bentley Campus)
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