Monday 

Description:

Today was the first day of my practicum internship at the Salisbury University Public Relations Office.  Megan Baker was training me to the basics of what I will be doing this semester. She described different duties such as running media advisories up to the Publications Office as well as the President’s Office. She also taught me how to answer the phone when she was not in the office and how to transfer to other lines in the office.

Megan then taught me how to send and post press releases and PSA’s. This was very helpful and I caught on quickly to what she was talking about. When we tried posting to the website we encountered some trouble so she sent me home and told me next time we would work on writing hometown press releases.

 

Reflection:

When I first arrived at the office I was pretty nervous because I was a little rusty on my writing since we had summer break. Megan immediately told me not to be worried and that everyone is nervous on their first day. After she described my different duties and introduced me to everyone I felt a lot more comfortable.  After she gave me a run down on the different activities and tasks I would be doing I felt excited because I knew I would be learning a lot this semester. The media advisories were printed and she explained how I am to prepare them for sending. This made me a little nervous because I was scared I would mess something up but she walked me through everything.

Megan then took me around the building to drop off the advisories at the appropriate offices and introduced me to everyone.  This again made me excited because I knew that it would get easier as the semester goes on. When we got back to the office and she started to teach me the phone I got nervous again, but she thoroughly explained to me and even wrote out a script of what to say. She even gave me different scenarios and what I should do if someone were to call, what I would say to them.

After this, Gabby sent me an email of a press release that needed to be sent and posted. Megan explained what this mean to me and took me through step by step what to do when sending an email and PSA out to editor’s in an email. I felt confident that I could complete this task and it made me even more excited to be working there. When she started to explain how to post press releases to the website, we experienced computer issues so she said it was fine if I left ten minutes early and that we would learn how to do this on Wednesday and that I also would be trained on hometown press releases. I was very excited after hearing that because I would be doing that on my own.

​

Description:

When I arrived at the office in the morning Megan had me send out a press release that needed to be sent and posted. I completed the task in an efficient amount of time so we moved onto the posting part when Megan taught me how to post on the Salisbury University website since we had technical difficulties on Monday. She walked me through all of the steps that I will need in order to post press releases on my own. After she finished this she explained how I would be writing hometown press releases for members of an honors society. She explained what and whatnot to do and had a clear template written out for me. I worked on these for the rest of my time and asked her a few good questions.

 

Reflection:

I was a lot more confident when I first walked into the office, especially when I sent out the press release. Megan gave me a lot of good feedback on what was good and what needed improvement in my emails. I was intimidated to show her my work at first but I appreciate criticism sine I know it will help me learn. We learned about the posting part of the task and I watched Megan as she explained the different steps of posting on the Salisbury website. She printed out directions for me too so I feel confident about posting in the future.

Megan then briefly explained what to do and what not to do when writing hometown press releases. This took only about 15 minutes and then she let me free to do it on my own. It was simple but I cam across a few tricky things and at first I was scared to ask her questions, but she said they were tricky and even she was confused so I felt a little bit better.  We came across a person who wrote down their mothers name but I could not read the writing. I asked Megan what to do and she told me to write a professional email. Megan had to edit my email I original typed out a lot because she said in this business people are easily offended. I think Megan is going to teach me a lot about being in public relations.