From Student to Graduate to Adulting in an Edinburgh PR Agency.
DASHING through life, trying to land on my feet and catching the dream.
Graduation: the day every fourth year student can’t wait to arrive – but it brings both joy and fear. It marks the day where years of hard work have finally paid off. Meeting deadlines by minutes, spending hours poring over journals, and passing days upon days stressing out in the library are all summed up in a (admittedly somewhat anticlimactic) two and a half hour long ceremony.
Five years ago, I started at Queen Margaret University studying Public Relations and Media. It was a crazy, wonderful and hectic four years that all came to an end in July 2016 when I graduated. Like most of my peers, I was on the frenzied hunt for employment, applying for traineeships, grad schemes, and jobs galore.
In the beginning, I got myself a real adult nine-to-five job for an insurance company. Sadly, it wasn’t related to my degree but a job’s a job so I took it. It was a great experience and it is always handy to know the phonetic alphabet off by heart.
Then, one fateful day perusing my emails, there it was: the PR graduate dream. The offer to join Holyrood PR, an Edinburgh PR agency, as a Junior Account Executive. But before I could jump on the offer, I had some logistics to figure out.
I live in the south side of Glasgow so planning my commute was difficult. My options were: 2 trains and a bus, 3 buses, or a 2 and a half hour drive. I settled for driving for the short term until I move through to Edinburgh. It has been a month since I have started and what a month it has been!
From winning battles with Excel to gaining coverage for clients, I feel like I’ve done it all. The whole team has welcomed me in and given me so much to do for which I am so thankful for.
Intermediate two administration had not prepared me well for the different admin tasks I was given. Despite achieving an A and believing I had a good grasp of all Microsoft Office applications, I struggled with the maths and formulas used in Excel for the coverage analysis. Nevertheless I fought on and have now mastered the tricky documents.
The Meet the Team blog series was one of the first tasks I was given which is actually really fun. Writing about myself was strange but I got through it and posted my first blog, which, to my surprise, got hundreds of hits. I have now also taken over the Instagram account where I try post something every day – you should give us a follow to find out more about what we get up to in the office.
Press releases are key in the world of PR and I have been tasked with them from the start. Two that I am particularly proud of and which each got a great spread of coverage were the ones I wrote for Bupa and Bell Ingram, on Christmas activity at a Glasgow care home and a festive property which was up for sale. It is an extremely good feeling to see all my hard work paying off.
There is such a mix of clients here that I always find myself learning or trying new things. I even got to indulge my sweet tooth by being a product tester for our ice cream client, Mackie’s of Scotland.
In just a month, I feel like I’ve learned a lot and know there is much more to come. Despite commuting every day from Glasgow, it has been a four weeks and I can’t wait to find out what’s coming next.
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