On my last day of my supervisor called me in to her office for
a ‘chat’ about my internship. I won’t lie, I was nervous. In my mind this was the part where she goes
through all my intern work and scrutinizes it, evaluating my progress in a
confronting finale to my placement. Of course that wasn’t the case. Instead,
she sat me down and said she was going to give me the most important advice she
could give about a career in public relations.
The first thing she spoke about was organisation.
Specifically, emails. She told me that as ridiculous as it may sound, sorting
your emails in to separate folders is the best thing you can do to stay on top
of your workload. In a corporate PR situation, as it would be with any communications
role, there is quite a bit of versatility in the work that you do. You may be
dealing with writing an internal article one day and organising a sponsorship
event the next, so it’s integral to be able to have each different sector of
your work carefully separated. It’s no fun having to search through your inbox
to look for an email or to forget to respond to something important.
Organisation is key.
The second thing she told me was that no matter how much
writing you do at university, nothing will prepare you for the amount of
writing you do in a real communications role. She told me that you may write 20
PR plans during your degree, but you probably won’t even need that skill until
you’re in a high level position. ‘Ninety per cent of my role is writing,’ she
said, and now I’m grateful that I studied a few journalism units while I’ve
been at university.
My supervisor finished off our meeting by thanking me for
all the work I had done and saying she’d happily write me a reference– this was
nothing like the scary final meeting I had envisioned. I left feeling grateful that
I had been able to have for such a rewarding and useful experience.
When I got home that day I opened my email inbox. I had 3,109
emails. Would you believe it, I managed to purge every unwanted subscription
and piece of junk until I had a neat inbox with a number of carefully organised
folders.
So here I am. Internship completed. I am now ready for a career
in public relations and so is my email inbox.
