Confessions of a Gorkana intern: part one

I’m Marissa, the new intern working across Product Marketing, Events and Sales at Gorkana. I’m a 3rd year PR & advertising student at the University of Westminster and I come from sunny Cyprus.

My first week at Gorkana has officially ended and I must confess that it has been far more exciting than I expected it to be. The best thing about starting a new internship or a job is meeting new people and noticing the different types of personalities within an organisation. These vary from the quiet readers, the strategic marketers, the competitive salespeople to the fun and outgoing event planners.

My main aim of this week was to dip my toe in the media intelligence water and gain as much knowledge as possible, even if it did give me a bit of a headache in the beginning. I’ll be honest, even though I’ve had other internships in the PR industry, it was mostly writing press releases, creating coverage reports, media lists and sending out products. However, during my time at Gorkana I’ve realised that due to the scope of what the database can do, PRs do not need to spend hours creating endless spreadsheets with contacts, which made me cry a bit inside for wasting so much valuable time on them previously.

The software training that I had and product demos helped me understand the ins and outs of the organisation, what it actually sells and all the fun things you can do – or at least fun things for people in comms industry!

In order to sum it up, the highlights of my week were:  

• Helping the events team organise team building activities for the annual sales kick-off. Who doesn’t like googling fun activities during work?
• Attending product marketing meetings, learning all about their complex strategies and their new ventures.
• And finally, being present during a client call with a multinational company. Even though I obviously did not contribute to the discussion it was something completely new for me as an intern and made me feel I was part of something important, even if it didn’t last long.

As you can tell, so far it’s been a brilliant experience and I can’t wait for my next week. Bring it on!