Hello everyone,
I hope that you all had
a great week doing your internship. Mine was just as frenetic as you can
imagine and it has been a very long week I should say before, during and after
the recent event that my company was organising.
In my previous blog
post, I was telling you that we were just one day before the event and we were
still busy doing call-backs for journalists, we were still updating the files
to put in the pen drives and putting stickers on the pen drives boxes as you
can see in the picture below.
As a PR intern, I must
say that this experience was really amazing and priceless. It gave me the
opportunity to show to my employers, one of my main talents: being a versatile
person. I could do anything if I was well briefed.
In fact, at my
workplace, I could have been left with only doing basic things which are known
to be very cliché such as photo copies, make coffee, and so on. But the thing
is, I was considered as an employee and I was given real responsibilities which
I took very seriously.
Furthermore, I realised
something during the event. To my opinion, I understood that we, as PR students
and later on as PR agents, cannot and, will never again, rely on journalists’ promises
to assist to events. Before the event, we have spent considerable time making
so many call-backs to the journalists every day for one week prior to the event
to see if they have got the e-Press Invitations and to confirm their presence.
We continued to phone
them in the morning of the event to make them remember to come by and they
confirmed. Then again, we phoned them on arriving to the site to explain them
the road and they would still say that they were on the road coming to the
event0! But as the event went through, out of 15, only two journalists made the
effort to come. I really cannot understand them. What’s the use of confirming
their presence and do not come later? I think that this is the only thing that
went wrong. I was really disappointed but what to do? It was one risk to take.
After the event, we had
so much things to do such as calling back journalists again for the photo
people and reading loads of newspaper to see if there was a maximum media
coverage. And I can tell you there was - though journalists did not attend the
event!
Moreover, I think as a
PR student and as most of us said in our first blog posts, we were scared to
make phone calls and working as PR agents in the real world, I think that by now,
we are used to the daily quota of work. Besides, I think that though we have been
going on through a lot lately with work pressure and on-going courses - meaning
on-going assignments too! -, I think that we have been taking our roles very
seriously and with countless patience. This perseverance and patience have made
me see things differently in the workplace. It has helped me to broaden my
knowledge and made me acquire hands-on experience especially during the event. As
the famous quote says it all:
“All
great work requires daily practice and endless patience!”
Enjoy being a PR
Intern.
Stay tuned for my next blog post,
Keshya S. Rassen.
