Exceeding Expectations

We all went into our internships knowing what the overall aim was - being to develop our professional skills and prepare us for a career in the 'real world'. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that the experience has done more than improve our skills, but instead has improved our  overall confidence in a way that never would have been possible in-side a classroom.

Granted we do work in teams for assignments, and we know how to interpret a brief and work toward an end product or goal. But the variety of jobs we undertook and the initiative we had no choice but to develop and use showed us that, combined with the theoretical knowledge we gained during our studies, we are more capable than we thought. 

Jobs I had never done before, and as such had no plan to follow or experience to derive information from, forced me to think critically, research, analyse and formulate a working style that allowed me to get the job done. For example writing for someone other than myself was challenging,  but had I never done so before entering the workforce, I wouldn't have developed the skills or work ethic that are now so valuable to me.

Some days I would come into the workplace and my supervisor would have new jobs for me that hadn't been previously set out in my brief, forcing me to think on my feet and work effectively - previously a weakness of mine. 

Working on jobs outside my industry or typical job description also helped me feel confident taking on jobs I wasn't normally used to or comfortable with. E.g. researching/tracking down tech equipment for the business and photography.

And of course no internship would be complete without its fair share of 'crappy jobs' as my supervisor liked to call them - which included invoicing for two of her three businesses. 

Interning definitely exceeded my expectations and benefited me in more ways than I anticipated, how about you?

Thanks for reading!

Bianca

An impromptu session

Hi everyone!

 

This would be my third post, and I will be touching on an interesting training that my company had.

 

After our work-in-progress (WIP) meeting, my supervisor had an impromptu Question and Answer (Q&A) session for everyone. Each of us would be asked a different topic that appears to be the news that most people are interested for that particular day, and we are supposed to express our view points to which we agree or not.

 

My topic was about the education in Singapore on the change of the English syllabus for primary schools. Other topics that my colleagues were asked on are politics, entertainment and social. After each of us presented our view points, other colleagues were encouraged to ask any further questions they might have with regards to the topic or to the answer that a particular person had commented.

 

After this Q&A session, my supervisor stated his reasons in holding this session. The reasons are:

-          To build up our presentation skills and confidence level

-          Not to think about anything and just present our true views to the topics

-          Not speaking/expressing views by memorising it off from our notes

 

I felt that the session is a unique way of training to improve our skills. In the PR industry, it is important for us to have good presentation skills and confidence to present the agency’s ideas well to the client. This little training also allows us to understand more about things that are happening in the society, the opinions of others, as well as a small gossip session for all of us to bond.

 

Cheers,

Delvina Chiang

15006527

Curtin Singapore

Selling an Idea

One of the hardest parts about working in a creative industry is having the guts to stand behind your own ideas. At uni, I always loved brainstorming ideas for different PR campaigns and strategies - sometimes you had to really sell your idea to the rest of the group, but it was easy to explain how it would all work in theory. However, the latter being the operative part, you never had to actually see your plan through and find out how it worked in reality.

In the workplace, if you sell an idea and have it approved, you now own the execution of that idea. You actually get to see whether your idea is a raging success, or if it's something that worked a whole lot better in theory. It's an incredibly exciting prospect, but also a bit of a scary one.

As I'm still fairly junior in my team, I've contributed a lot of ideas to other people's communications strategies, but I haven't owned my own one yet. However, from seeing how other people's plans have progressed through the approval process, it can be a pretty brutal exercise. Fantastic ideas can get shut down based on the opinion of one person who doesn't quite 'get' it. That can be hard enough regardless of how experienced you are, but when you're just starting out and not confident that your ideas are at all good, it can be pretty nerve wracking to put anything forward.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way in the workplace, does anyone have any ideas for how to improve your confidence?