I’m writing this blog post on the day that my six-week internship as an online PR assistant at Propellernet comes to an end. I’ve enjoyed the experience so much and learnt a great deal in a relatively short amount of time, which I’m certain is a testament to all the great people here!

I was offered the internship as part of the Sussex Internship Programme, run by Wired Sussex. It’s one of the best schemes of its kind in the country, giving graduates not only the opportunity but also the funding to get real, valuable work experience in media companies in Sussex. I was lucky enough to be selected by Propellernet!

Rather than spending six weeks just watching what everyone’s been up to, I’ve actually been involved in a huge range of projects and have completed high-responsibility tasks- I’ve interviewed case studies, sold-in press releases to journalists and written copy and press releases myself. It’s given me the opportunity to boost my CV and gain further confidence in my abilities while also freeing up time for the team here to work on other projects.

Propellernet have a great range of clients across different sectors which has meant that I’ve been able to get a breadth of experience and be involved in travel and retail campaigns as well as business to business ones- all great experiences, although my favourite campaigns have definitely been the travel ones- I’ve worked on these the most and have learnt all about using Twitter for marketing purposes and Persona Insight in the campaigns which was really interesting.

I’ve also been involved in the in-house marketing for Propellernet itself, writing this blog post, putting together award entries and compiling and writing a newsletter. I’ve never learnt about this side of things before so gaining some experience of how a company promotes itself has been really useful for me and it’s opened my eyes as to other career paths I could explore- another reason why this internship has been so great.

For anyone who’s looking for a PR or marketing internship I can whole-heartedly recommend coming to Propellernet and I’ll be sorry to leave come the end of the day. Their approach to recruiting interns is really encouraging- having completed work experience elsewhere whilst I was at university, I’m well aware that ‘intern’ actually means ‘tea-maker’ in some organisations. It’s safe to say that I’m going to take a lot more than tea-making away from this experience!