My first internship !

Hello dear PR people, 

I am Keshya Rassen and I wanted to share my personal experience as being an intern as well as my first footsteps in the working world. I have just started my internship at PROAKTIV PR Ltd which is a Public Relations Consultancy company in Mauritius since 2008. It is a small company with a few staff members but a very efficient and effective team. It’s been one week today and what I can say it’s been one of the busiest and the most knowledgeable week of my life! 

I think that most of us doing the internship module was quite stressed and worried like me before starting the internship. Personally, I was so stressed about not finding a suitable internship as per the assignment requirements but I did find an excellent one.

The first day I was so stressed about not being able to meet the expectations of my employer as I have actually never worked before and did not what was really expected from me.  However, everyone at the office knew how to put you at your ease and helped me to integrate myself in their team. Being a versatile person, I did not take long to adapt to the new situation. One thing that really marked me, is the convivial atmosphere that reigned there and this gave a boost to my motivation to work harder and give the best of myself. 

After several briefing sessions on my first and on second day on the ongoing files, I was given real responsibilities in the company. I helped the Account Officer to do the Press Monitoring and since I loved doing Maths in High School and that I loved to deal with numbers and calculations, they asked me to manage and calculate the Advertising Value Equivalent(AVE). Later in the week, the senior partner asked me that I would be the one to draft a Press Release for one of our clients. Oh, I can tell that it was not a piece of cake at all in the beginning to draft my first Press Release with only three lines of information on the subject! However, I did manage to write it after three-days of thorough research on the given subject! 

Overall, what I can tell after one week is that the working world and what we have learned throughout a three-study course and accumulated theories learnt from different modules are completely not the same. Of course, at some point it helped, but, since each company has its own way of working, it differed from what I have learnt. This is how I realised that although having done almost a three-year course in Public Relations and can be considered as a future graduate, I knew nothing about the real working world and, of course, less in the real Public Relations working field. This is why I came to a conclusion that I have everything yet to learn from my employers and from their own work experiences.

However, I really think that it is going to be a wonderful experience and I hope that you are all enjoying your internships like me!

I am looking forward to you sharing your internship experience with me.

Best regards,

Keshya Rassen.