I never thought my first experience with work in the public relations field would be structured the way it was. I always imagined team meetings at a big table, lunch get-togethers with my fellow interns, and a full new wardrobe of business attire. I never would have pictured myself sitting at my desk in my dorm room in a sweatshirt on Zoom completing all of my work virtually. But when a global pandemic arises, everyone adjusts as best as possible to still operate effectively.
Despite the setbacks of distanced learning and working, I still had a fantastic experience interning for Hill Communications. In just one semester of working with them I gained a massive amount of invaluable skills and felt like I was becoming one step ahead from the rest of my peers. One of my favorite programs that the firm has is weekly required meetings for first-time interns. The goal of these meetings is to help the interns build up skills outside of what their account may need from them. In the first few weeks alone I had created an extremely professional LinkedIn, resume, and many of the pieces of sample work that are listed on my portfolio. These meetings were not just beneficial for me and the other interns. The work we did benefitted Hill Communications by ensuring that the social media presence of all of its employees is up to the company’s standards.
Skills like a social media calendar, media monitoring, and content creation can be taught in a classroom. But working on a company’s account firsthand brings other experiences to light that a classroom setting could never prepare someone for; especially in the world of virtual working. Communication is a lot harder when we are not all face-to-face. The account I worked on proved this as our client was sometimes hard to reach and even harder to please with the content we presented them with. My team spent the entire semester tirelessly creating examples of the different services we offer. We drafted pitches, blog posts, social media posts, new social media accounts, media audits, etc. to support the direction the company wanted to go in. Our quick turnaround from one project to the next gave me a lot of insight into how the world of public relations is not perfect, and that in many cases you will have to work with clients that are not always sure of what they want from you. Overall, I am actually extremely grateful for this experience. It gave me the opportunity to be exposed to many different types of material that a public relations professional can produce – much more than one account normally does in one semester. It also taught me incredibly important soft skills such as how to have a superhuman amount of dedication and flexibility. As my next semester is beginning in the not-so-distant future, I am incredibly excited to see what working for Hill Communications will look like outside of a Zoom screen.