Before you start your Internship… Watch the Karate Kid.

Hey everyone!

I'm  just about half-way through my internship, and this is my first blog entry! I'm excited to share this with you all as I'm sure it will ring true for many of us currently completing our internships.

If you’re not familiar with the Karate Kid, I highly recommend that you watch it! For those of who are familiar with it, you may already know what I'm talking about. If you do, bear with me as I promise I'm not going crazy, there is a point to this!

When Daniel and Mr Miyagi first meet, Daniel is almost certain that he is merely just a slave, aiming to fulfil the purpose of completing Mr Miyagi’s menial tasks such as waxing his car and painting his fence. Promised that Mr Miyagi would take Daniel under his wing and teach him kung-fu, Daniel is yet to see the value in his “menial tasks”. It is later revealed that all those tasks were really the foundations to those important kung-fu moves.

We are always told that there are the "not so glamorous" roles in PR, such as administration duties and the ever important, but equally frustrating, pre- event logistics, but these tasks are crucial in developing a higher level of PR skills- well, in my opinion anyway!

So where am I going with this? As an intern, I myself have often become frustrated with the sometimes “menial tasks” I have been given. Heading into my internship experience I assured myself that these were tasks I would need to complete in order to learn, but when it came to actually doing these tasks- this thought process soon went out the window as I was more interested in asking, “So, when will I be completing the social media strategy?”

After completing a few days of these tasks, I soon had an epiphany. How could I develop a social media strategy or publish important data if I don’t know how to master Excel or even PowerPoint? Embracing this thought, I threw myself into developing my “basic” PR skills, so that once I have confidently mastered these skills, I am ready to take on the next challenge.

In saying all this, I have been incredibly fortunate with my internship experience in that I have been given a few such menial tasks. I am actually grateful that I have been given the opportunity to practice these skills, such as Excel!?, in a real world setting,- because when else am I going to practice using Excel? And thankfully, now that I have “mastered” these important foundation skills, I have been lucky enough to be involved with some really cool projects on campus here at Curtin!

Stay tuned for my next blog, where I discuss exactly what the Place Activation team do here at Curtin. If you already know, let me know what you think it’s all about!

Attention to Detail

In life we all know there is an importance when it comes to detail, although in a public relations sense, detail is everything! It is the reputation which you are publicly representing; therefore anyone can see the mistakes. 

Recently it has been my responsibility to send emails back to people who have submitted photos into our competition and to thank them for their submission. This is where the little things of PR really make a difference, such as; not giving people the wrong idea about their submission, or making sure it is BCC not CC when replying to them all as we don’t want to give out peoples private emails. Also it makes you read every word carefully, as it would look horrible if the email (sent to over 400 people) had spelling mistakes or errors throughout. 

Also over my internship I have been conducting a booklet which is to be used for a Growers Tour to China and Vietnam. This booklet is being released to 50 people who are attending the tour and was proofread by 5 people in the department including myself. Although some things did not seem important or noticeable, it was the small things such as commas before and after numbers that I managed to pick up. For example it said Wednesday 7, September and the next one said Thursday, 8 September. These minor details were not important to the information, although they made the document look unified when it was all completed. This is something I have enjoyed about my internship, is finishing a project and seeing it completed, printed and binded. It is such an achievement and makes it worth putting the effort into your work.  

Throughout the time I am at CBH we have been using things such as campaign monitor and other software programs that allow us to evaluate how many internal employees open links and read what type of stories. This attention to detail meant that I had to write a newsletter piece with more of a personal twist as people opened links to stories that moved more away from business information and more into the environment of the people in the building. When analysing this information it shows the importance and effort you have to put in to communicating and the best way to do this.

Also at CBH the decision was made within the internal communications team to release more documents as videos rather than emails or documents published to the website, therefore a video planning meeting was set up between 4 people including myself to discuss how this would be done. Video planning meeting process was extensive and broken up into 4 sections; idea, processes, actions and objectives. Using this 4 section process means that each important point can be taken into consideration and the action which the team needs to take to tackle each obstacle. This is something we have been taught over our entire degree at Curtin, to double check everything, make sure you have the facts, and assess the situation accordingly. 

So remember my fellow PR brothers and sisters, pay attention to detail, it is a reputation on the line!

Happy PR Interning :)

-Rachel