By: Ran Xu

Often times, we hear people say “oh my god, I love fashion PR, I must do that” or “I hate doing sports PR, no-no.” The simple truth is that you will never know what you really like unless you experience it yourself. That’s why we need internships to help us figure out the discrepancy between our imagination and actual real-world scenarios. Even more importantly, we need them to decide whether we are comfortable with the workplace culture, environment, responsibilities and many other elements that are all far beyond the fancy charade of working in public relations. Continue reading →

By: Ian Junwei Gu

As a public relations intern, you may sometimes find yourself sitting in the office and feeling like you aren’t doing anything all that important for the day. Maybe you feel like you’re wasting your time and learning little from the internship? Then maybe it is time to figure out how to maximize your internship.

Throughout my summer internship at Illume Public Relations, an agency specializing in digital media and consumer tech, I have enjoyed the intense and fast-paced working experience with my team. Still, at times I did not have a specific task to do, and the last thing I wanted to do was kill my time by just sitting there scrolling through my Twitter and Instagram streams. Therefore, I came up with several approaches to keep myself busy and maximize the experience.

1) Always Ask
First and foremost, you can always ask your supervisor or co-workers to see if there is anything you can help with. Sometimes your supervisor assumes that you are working on something so they wont assign you another task, especially when you report to a team rather than a specific person. It’s highly likely that everyone might think someone else has given you work.

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 By: Laura Johnson

This summer I had the pleasure of working at the largest public relations agency in the world, Edelman. During my 13-week experience at the Los Angeles office, I learned the ins and outs of being successful in the PR industry. Continue reading →