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Week Two: 24 Sep - 2 Oct

Last week each of the 2009 Brunswick Interns told you the story of how they got their place on the programme, and about their first few days at Unicorn House. This week each Intern in turn talks you through a different day of the internship, from Thursday to Thursday, the second week of the programme.

This is the second blog entry from the 2009 Brunswick Six,
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By Brunswick Interns

Thursday 24 September (Junior)

On Tuesday Chris gave us a briefing on the newspaper industry, and how different newspapers promoted or opposed certain ideologies in society. That was relevant, because at the end of that session we had each been given a different newspaper and told to pick three articles, and to identify the information, comment and analysis in those pieces. And the deadline for that assignment was today.

So, as soon as lunch was concluded, we anxiously waited to give our views on the paper we’d been assigned. As each of us presented our chosen news stories, and discussed their content, a wider discussion on the newspaper industry developed. It was interesting, because within the team there were some common and some separate views on each of the papers. All views were welcomed, and challenged if necessary, which was really good; overall it created a better understanding of how each newspaper functioned, and of the wider role of newspapers in the UK.

As a Journalism graduate, it was interesting to see how passionate each newspaper was about whatever it represented. And the two newspaper sessions – the one on Tuesday, and today’s session – have definitely made me think more about which papers to read, and which of the national dailies best represents my way of life.

After the newspaper discussion, Chris moved onto the first of his language sessions. As an introduction we all read through a document on the internship programme looking out for and discussing all the spelling, grammatical and formatting errors. I won’t tell you how many I spotted, but the exercise certainly resulted in plenty of debate.

Friday 25 September (Tina)

This morning we each had to deliver our presentation – the presentations we had originally prepared for the assessment centre – in front of one another for the first time. Ashka and Sarah also watched us perform.

And that wasn’t all. There was going to be a spin – we all had to grade each other’s work. That was especially hard, not least because none of us had ever graded presentations before; but Sarah gave us guidelines on the types of things to look out for.

We each listened and watched and listed our scores from first to last, and then we spoke about any improvements we could each have made. All in all, with the presenting and the grading of each other’s work, it was a very good character building exercise.

In the afternoon we made our way down to Brunswick’s offices at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. On arrival, we had a tour around the building, which was nice – it was quite surprising to see how close people’s desks were!

We then went back into the main room for a session run by the very inspirational Sheila Robinson, from Brunswick’s media training business Trinity, who told us the importance of honesty and integrity.

Jayne Rosefield from Brunswick then came and took over the session. She was amazing. She gave us an overview of what it meant to work in financial PR, with case studies of clients she had worked with and worked for. She was very supportive about the fact that we have limited knowledge about the industry, and made sure to remind us that practice makes perfect. It was a good end to a long week.

Monday 28 September (Claude)

The day began with us updating Sarah on our Friday session at Brunswick (see Tina’s blog above). Then we watched the 2006 comedy/drama film satire ‘Thank You For Not Smoking’, which is a witty look at the world of lobbying in the United States. I enjoyed the movie as it tapped into one of my other passions – politics – and in particular US politics. We are going to be discussing and reviewing the film in one of Chris’ sessions in a couple of weeks, so we all took notes as we watched!

I think it’s fair to say the whole group eagerly anticipated the second session today, because we had the pleasure of meeting the principal shareholder of Taylor Bennett, Heather McGregor. After an introduction and brief history about her career to date, she set us our presentation brief for the week.

We each had three days to investigate a different retail company (Tesco plc in my case) ready to give a ten minute presentation on it on Friday morning, to Sarah at Unicorn Jobs and Taylor Bennett consultant Faith Conley, who sat in on Heather’s session.

We had to look into who ran the company, how big the company was, how much money it makes, and finally to uncover three interesting facts. The project would test our ability to read the financial markets, as well as our ability to research our subject in a limited amount of time, not to mention putting all of this information into the context of corporate communications, eg how would each of the things we discover affect a company’s reputation among its shareholders etc.

My usual modus operandi when given any kind of assignment would see me leaving everything until the next day. But as this assignment would test our knowledge of and our ability to assimilate a lot of corporate and financial information in a short space of time, I decided to start immediately.

The session ended on a very positive note. Heather told us of her reasoning behind setting up this internship, and I was struck by her passion and energy for this field of work. She left me with a thought and opinion that I would like to share with you – there are people that talk about it and people that do it. I think we all agree that we want to be in the latter group.

Tuesday 29 September (Param)

After Heather’s detailed brief on Monday afternoon, we set off immediately on Tuesday morning researching the companies we had been given to investigate. We’d not been given any choice over which company we would present on, which meant some of us (me!) were not so happy. Nevertheless, we all sat quietly researching, and I was pleasantly surprised how quickly we all attuned to the task ahead.

At first me, and some of the other interns, found it difficult making sense of the various financial measures used to assess a FTSE 100 company. However, by the end of the morning session we were getting to grips with the information.

On Tuesday afternoon Chris gave us a four hour session on the broadsheets; yes four hours! After a brief review of the big news stories of the moment, we had many detailed conversations on the ‘hows’, ‘whys’ and ‘whats’ of The Times newspaper, as well as being introduced to newswires and their significance.

It was interesting stuff and we all learnt a lot from this one session. Overall I think we had a great, productive day.

Wednesday 30 September (Charlotte)

I’m on reception this week, an unpopular role amongst us Interns, mainly because your desk has a laptop instead of a nice big iMac! Plus, of course, you have to multitask. To be honest it requires very little effort, but with all the training, travelling, trips and presentations to get on with we have little time to do anything, never mind running errands, answering calls and door buzzers! But that’s all part of office life, so it’s a good learning experience.

We spent the morning preparing for Friday’s presentations. The brief required us to get familiar with lots of numbers – share prices, net profits etc – and lots of other money things I know very little about. Though I notice that, despite all the lush eating places near the office, we now all bring in a packed lunch, for various reasons, but mainly financial.

This afternoon we took the Central Line across to the Taylor Bennett offices near Cavendish Square for their version of an introduction to PR (providing another perspective on the topic, after Chris at Unicorn and Jayne at Brunswick’s previous introductions).

We met Leila Reuter, a friendly and heavily pregnant Taylor Bennett Consultant, who spoke to us about investor relations. Director Chantal Tregear came and spoke a little about internal communications, which to my surprise is much more than newsletters and emails! Then we heard from Matthew Wall, who had just returned from the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, and he gave us a session on public affairs.

Finally we were visited by Faith Conley, a familiar face, and the person who will be watching our presentations on Friday. It was another brilliant afternoon!

Thursday 1st October (Jenard)

Today was the first time we didn’t start the day at the Unicorn offices, because today we were visiting the Bank Of England Museum. It start off a little confusing for me (who knew that Bank tube station had so many exits?), but after finally finding the correct exit, I emerged up out of the tube station and was immediately taken back by how grand the area was.

These great buildings, that reflect the majesty of British architecture, surround you, really underlining where it was that we were going this morning. I met my fellow Interns at the pre-arranged point, and then we joined the other interns from Brunswick and the reps from Taylor Bennett. We all introduced ourselves and got to know each other a little better, and then made our way to the visitors entrance of the Bank, where we had to wait a little while for the giant doors to be opened for us.

Once inside and checked through security, we watched an interesting short film about the role of the Bank in the UK economy. We learnt who arranged the interest rate in the UK and why they would raise it or decrease it according to what was beneficial to the economy. Then we all took turns in lifting an actual bar of gold and playing the different games in the museum areas.

Back to Unicorn House, and after lunch Chris took us through a very engaging talk about the broadsheet newspapers – a second discussion on the topic, this time focusing in particular on the Telegraph and The Guardian. It was very interesting to see the many differences between the different papers, with regards to what stories were main features, the amount of advertising, and the general layout. After our various discussions this last week, we all knew that the way we looked at newspapers had definitely changed.

With the formal session done, we all continued working into the evening finishing off the presentations we had to give the following morning. We are all still here and still loving every minute of it!