I’m in London for a fortnight at the moment for a placement with financial and corporate PR company Hudson Sandler. After being here just over a week I’ve decided it’s probably a good time to reflect on my experience so far and what I’m hoping to achieve by t
he end of this week.
I originally found the whole prospect a little daunting- financial PR, what was I getting myself into? I had an image in my head of an office full of maths graduates (obviously from the so called “red brick” Universities) who’d snigger at my PR degree.
I was pleasantly surprised that they all seemed normal and that they were actually intrigued by my degree (one of the girls did a PR degree herself!)
I was set to work with various tasks; newspaper read- throughs, speaker profiles and creating new databases. It wasn’t until I recieved feedback that I realised how much previous placements had helped me. They were impressed that I was competent with Gorkana (learnt at Nelson Bostock) and liked the way I laid out profile documents for speakers and companies (thanks to Wolfstar).
I’m not going to lie there has been a couple of occasions in the last week that I have felt a little out of my depth. I was invited to attend a results meeting for a client, with analysts, and they could well have been speaking another language at some points. Although I feel I have a fairly decent grasp of business and economic jargon, I was overwhelmed with financial terms and phrases and the fast paced questions and answers! I stumbled my way through though, and actually came out of it with some relevant notes!
The placement has given me a great insight into what financial and corporate PR is all about and I believe I’ve learnt a lot about what this sector of PR actually involves. With the wide range of sectors available within the PR industy I’ve been left thinking, which one is right for me? Only time will tell..
2 Comments
August 26, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Hi Nat, I feel I know you quite well now after working with you for quite a while. So I hope you don’t mind me saying that I think you will find financial PR isn’t really for you. I think you like to be challenged, and like learning new things, but somehow I can’t see you getting overly excited over announcing a PLC’s latest profit margins.
One thing is for sure, it’s good to get experience from a variety of sectors as the cultures are often very different. I hope you enjoyed the experience down there and you can tell us all about it when we see you next.
August 27, 2008 at 7:36 am
That’s why we teach public relations within a business context at Leeds Met. It dismays some, but you’ve already worked it out.
It certainly makes sense to gain as much experience of different sectors as possible. Then don’t forget that most people working in PR are in-house – not in consultancies…