Week Five: 16-23 Oct

It’s week five of the Brunswick internship programme. The team takes you through what happened, day by day…

This is the fifth blog entry from the 2009 Brunswick Six, click here to return to the blog index

By Brunswick Interns

Friday 16th October (Claude)

This afternoon’s session at Brunswick was very inspirational, as we spoke to David Sutphen from Brunswick’s Washington office. He spoke to us about his role within Brunswick, and how he became involved in communications in the first place.

I felt that all my fellow interns were as inspired as myself by David, particularly as he told us of how he had worked with the legendary Democrat Senator Kennedy. He also told us of his belief that post-Obama his job will change, not least because of new regulations the new American government may bring in that may affect David’s clients.

He went on to explain how communications works in the United States, and then gave us some examples of how some of the skills we have been learning about, such as networking, are important for career development. He stressed the importance of starting at the bottom and working your way up, learning skills as you go, as opposed to skipping your way up and missing the basics.

Our second talk at Brunswick this week was also very interesting. This time it was Rurik Ingram, who gave us a history of the company, an outline of the challenges it has faced, and explanations of how they overcame them, particularly in South Africa. He also spoke about the challenges of expanding into new emerging markets, such as Asia, and how it is important to have people native to a country as your first contact, to show you how things work within that country

Our third session was with James Olley, who was on hand to give us a better understanding of how to talk to the media. He showed us how a typical day in the news world works, and it quickly became apparent how fast the 24 hour media cycle spins round, and how you have to be aware of all the events that may impact on you and your clients.

He also gave us some tips on how to speak to the press, and made it very clear that you should never ever lie, while stressing that if you don’t want something to be recorded then simply don’t say it, the term “off the record” is open to interpretation.

As is now the tradition, this Brunswick session seemed even better than the last one, as hard as that is to believe. I would like to thank James, Rurik and David for providing us with another insightful afternoon.

Monday 19th October (Charlotte)

We are now half way through the programme! The Interns you hear before you are very different from the six that started five weeks ago. For one, we now know everything there is to know about PR and communications… Well, almost. The general consensus amongst us, is we are getting much more out of this programme than we had expected. I think I speak on behalf of everyone when I say we feel really privileged to be here and overwhelmed at the time invested in us, the organisation and the belief behind both the programme and us as individuals. Tear. Thanks guys!

So every Monday morning, we gather round and Sarah gives us our schedule and presentation brief for that week. And today was no different. We already knew we were going to re-present the previous week’s presentation (on our media company) on Wednesday at the FT, but we were expecting, or rather dreading, to be given another presentation for that coming Friday as well. Instead, the Unicorn team took pity on us and we weren’t given an extra one to do this week, which meant for the rest of the day we could devote our full attention to tweaking and improving our existing presentations.

Tuesday 20th October (Junior)

Tuesday isn’t like any other day here at the Unicorn Jobs office, it’s a time to express yourself just by wearing casual clothes to work. It is for this reason we have nicknamed it ‘dress down Tuesday’, although I occasionally call it ‘Trendy Tuesday’ (TT).

But the importance of this day wasn’t about ‘trends’, it was about learning something new.

For the past four weeks we have been glued to the City, starting to understand the statistics and figures which indicate a business’s success or failure, and where better to keep up to date with such stats than in the Financial Times?

However, our understanding of the FT was still a little blurred. To address that, in our morning session we met Jackie Shorey, who worked for the FT for over 18 years and is now a freelance journalist, and who taught us a great deal about the paper’s history and structure, and her experiences working there, as well as how to read the FT in a tight space (ie on crowded trains)!

The afternoon session was held with Chris, where we discussed the regional press and magazines. The session was as much interactive as it was informative, because we were each given three magazines and told to research their individual circulations, which was interesting as it gave us a better understanding of the magazine industry in contrast to the newspapers we had reviewed over the last few weeks.

There is clearly never a dull day on this internship, and even a ‘dress down Tuesday’ is evidence of this.

Wednesday 21st October am (Param)

We went straight to Taylor Bennett first thing Wednesday morning this week. The reason for this was because the usual afternoon slot at TB had been taken over by the Financial Times visit.

This TB session was a productive one – a job search session with Katherine Cox and James Magowan. We looked at the kind of communications careers that are out there and discussed what would best suit each of us.

We covered how to apply for jobs and graduate opportunities effectively, and what a good covering letter should look like. We all finished the session with a lot more confidence in what kind of PR suits our abilities best. Finally, I would just like to wish Katherine the best of luck with the pregnancy!

Wednesday 21st October pm (Tina)

This Wednesday afternoon must have been one of the most anticipated and nerve racking experiences I have had this year, and I’m pretty sure the rest of the group felt the same way. We had to redo our presentations from last Friday in the London Bridge offices of the Financial Times newspaper in front of Victoria Tomlinson, the Chief Executive of PR agency Northern Lights. Not only did we want to impress Victoria in our own right, we didn’t want to let Heather down, because we knew Victoria had expressed an interest in developing a similar internship programme up North.

However, before we met Victoria we were introduced to the one of the FT’s communications team, Esther. Junior, who had been researching FT owners Pearson last week, interviewed Esther about her path into her current role. The rest of us also had the opportunity to ask her questions. Meeting her was a delight and she gave very helpful advice.

Personally, I think everybody performed really well with our presentations and we all definitely received positive feedback from Victoria. After we were done, she definitely seemed even more interested in running a programme like ours through her agency. If she does decide to run this programme, I do hope that our performances here had something to do with her decision.

Thursday 22nd October (Jenard)

We now have next week’s presentation assignment which, for the first time, will involve us working in groups. Therefore this morning each group met for the first time. Param, Junior and I are in one group while the rest of the interns are in the other. We used the morning to get together to set out our plans and strategies and get some research done. Then, most of us had an early lunch so that we could get ready to go for our visit to the London Metal Exchange.

We walked from the Unicorn Jobs office to the Metal Exchange and were able to see a few of the landmark buildings that make up the ‘City’. Once we got to the exchange, we got to actually see it in action. To the untrained eye (like mine) it looked like a bunch of people in suits just shouting at each other until a bell rang. But after looking at a short film about the purpose of the Metal Exchange and how it worked, we began to see that the traders used a lot of hand signals to trade with each other. It was a very enjoyable learning experience.

After the Metal Exchange visit, Chris took us through a session on how to write up an interview. Later we moved on to a very engaging review writing session where Chris spoke to us about methods of constructing a review about a film we had all seen. It was a great way to practice our writing skills, and we all relished the opportunity discuss our favourite films!