My First Week at the Award winning Holyrood PR

By Clarissa Lulli

Talent should be nurtured and encouraged to flourish. At Holyrood PR we love having hungry young minds to feed, so we have a constantly rolling intern programme. Clarissa joined us at our office in Edinburgh to learn how public relations works at our agency. We throw our PR interns in at the deep end where they get a real taste of public relations, not just a dreary diet of filing and kettle duties.

WORKING as an intern for Holyrood PR is a real honour for me.

The fields of communications and media have always interested me, and this why I enrolled in the Bachelor of Communications and Public Relations in 2012.

Now, thanks to this internship, I have the opportunity to finally learn as much as possible about public relations practice to understand if this is the right kind of media career for me.

I have to admit that I am not completely sure if I want to become a PR professional in the future, since I currently have several passions in disparate areas, such as marketing and design. It is for this reason that I decided to do this internship, in order to better understand what working for this industry is like and to clarify my ideas about what possible options are available for me after graduation.

In the meantime, as I am an extremely curious individual, I am trying to assimilate as much information as possible here, by observing how PR professionals work, how they talk over the phone, what they say and do.

All the different tasks given to me on a daily basis are helping me to learn about how to write about media coverage, upload press releases, make phone calls to local newspapers and magazines, and edit content.

What I have appreciated the most about this agency in my first week is that everything seems to be well-organised. I especially like morning meetings, as tasks are allocated and everyone keeps up to date the rest of the team with what he or she is working on.

On my first two days I was obviously quite nervous, but I soon felt more relaxed as the whole team welcomed me with a smile and was always ready to answer my questions. Everyone here is very polite, friendly, and easy-going, which is certainly a positive aspect. In particular, Digital Account Exec, Sarah, has always been very nice and patient when giving me a hand to solve issues.

Being an intern at Holyrood PR is not only a challenge because it represents my first experience in public relations, but also because it is the first time that I work in such a formal environment, where a real office space is provided and a sort of dress code is required. This is an additional reason why I initially felt slightly anxious about working here, but it has already become part of my routine.

Days at Holyrood are intense – in a good way – full of interesting duties to complete by the end of the day. I can’t actually believe it’s been a week already and I am looking forward to receiving lots of valuable feedback so that I can learn as much as possible over the next three weeks.