My First (Tentative) Steps into PR

I’ll be very honest: Public Relations was never a field I could ever picture myself doing in the long term.

That’s why when I stepped into SW Strategies, I was full of apprehension.

It took me over 40 internship applications and four interviews with not even a rejection email afterwards to end up here.

For a moment, I was convinced I wasn’t going to graduate on time.

If you were to ask me what I thought PR was like and how that has changed after my almost 10 weeks here, the answer is simply that I wasn’t very off.

Coming into this internship, I did my research like any Literature student would.

I stalked Google search results, news articles, Instagram, and anything that mentioned the company’s name.

And I went through blogs after blogs about people recounting their experiences working in the field.

What caught me off guard was how much I thought I knew about current affairs, but really didn’t.

I have never been so updated about industries I’d never look twice at.

But the amount of time I spent deep-diving and researching felt somewhat familiar and comforting, a callback to my daily work in school.

There was also the environment.

On my first day, I expected to be walking into a sterile office with neat, organised desks.

Obviously, I hadn’t known what a co-working space is.

When I was lost in the area, squinting my eyes at vague indications on Google Maps, I definitely wasn’t looking out for a cafe I had never heard of before, despite it being in my neighbourhood.

And then the next day I found myself working from home because the rest of the Singapore team was driving to Kuala Lumpur.

10 weeks later, and I still have mixed feelings about working from home so much, despite the envy from all my peers.

On one hand, I’m very much a lazy introvert.

But at the same time, it has always been easier and more productive for me to work around others.

It was that way in school, and that hasn’t changed.

The Silence in my Inbox: A Glimpse of My 10 Weeks

Of course, like any job, there was no glitz and glam.

A large chunk of my time was spent drafting and sending emails, with most of them ultimately floating in the limbo of opened but unanswered.

After a while, adding a line at the start of “Hope you’re having a great day”, “Hope you had a good weekend”, “Happy Friday” was like muscle memory.

Follow-up after follow-up, it was like dating a professional ghoster.

Nonetheless, that satisfaction and smile that creeps when I receive a reply? Even if it was a lacklustre response.

Maybe it’s time I start replying to all the backlog of emails from my school.

There are small moments that exist like a collage of tableaus when I look back at these ten weeks:

• Sitting at my make-shift desk at home, trying to think of words
• Pressing the schedule email button after checking twice, thrice for mistakes
• Keeping my phone on ringer so I wouldn’t miss any messages (especially when my friends were texting)
• Scrolling through TikTok—

Scrolling. Tik. Tok.

Last summer, when my friend told me her internship was basically scrolling through TikTok all day everyday, I remember telling her “wah, good life sia”.

But now, after mindlessly watching short clips when I have nothing else to do, just so I could feel like I was doing something…

Well, I suspect I won’t be opening the app for a good while.

An Unexpected Clarity

To clarify, this isn’t some miracle story where 10 weeks working here completely changed my mind towards PR.

I’m (probably) not going to suddenly flip a 180 and dedicate my next ten years working up the ladder in a PR agency.

But it would be a shame (and a sham) to say my 10 weeks here were a waste.

Every week of me writing emails, drafting media pitches, even that one week I was reading Google-translated interview transcripts and articles in order to write a media story, it all mattered.

So PR may not be my ‘dream job’ or the calling of my life, but I’m grateful to have spent my ten weeks here. At least I was writing words and not processing numbers.

Creative writing and media writing might be completely different, but I was surprised by how much my own opinions could still bleed into my work.

And as a writer, every little experience helps.

What was the best part of my time here?

Call me weird and insane, but my 10 weeks here somehow helped me clear my mind.

It might be tiring to immediately return to a new school semester after my final day here in SW, but I will be going into my last year with newer perspectives that would hopefully inspire my next work.

I came into SW a burnt-out final-year student afraid of the real-world outside academia, and now that I’m leaving, I’m still uncertain about my future career direction, but in part, now just a little more ready for what’s coming after graduation.

Even if it won’t consist of me writing any more media pitches.

P.S. A small realisation: maybe I do need a crazy team of individuals working with me.