Asher H, Year 10 student:
When I first got my placement at Conscious Communications my first thoughts told me that it wasn’t going to be my type of thing at all. I was prejudiced about it I guess since I had no prior knowledge about marketing. Having to learn a whole new thing got me worried about the experience. However, I was able to adapt quickly and handle everything smoothly.
When I first arrived at the office Jonah came down to meet me and we started off my first day looking at newspaper articles, touring the office and talking about our interests. It was a slow and welcoming start to my day, which I think was the best way to start the week. On Monday, I was able to have a group call that morning to meet everyone; the whole team was so lovely, and I could tell straight away that I would definitely enjoy the rest of my time here.
The prompt they gave me for my week was to create a press release, three social media posts, a poster and a list of three people that could be potential ambassadors for Cambridge City Foodbank’s Summer Appeal. My favourite tasks to do was to create the social media posts and the poster for the campaign using Canva. I picked Design & Technology as a GCSE, so I enjoy practising my creativity with drawings and designing my workbook with different colours and doodles. Canva was obviously different but still the same concept. Being able to choose the colours for texts, which photos would work best and making sure each post is eye-catching was exciting do to. Especially with all the support I got with George and his help with making sure I got the best out of each piece.
The hardest task in my opinion was writing the press release. This was my first time writing a piece like this. I’m more used to creative writing and script writing as I focus more on English Lit & Lang as well as Film Studies at school more than the technical subjects. So, I am used to using lots of description and emotive language which is obviously very different from a press release being just fact, fact, fact. Even after lots of help from Sophie and Rick I was still struggling quite a bit, so I was extra grateful when Jonah was able to complete it with me on Wednesday morning. Thankfully everyone was happy with my finished products, especially with the press release! I was worried that I was having so much fun doing everything, but people wouldn’t be happy with the outcome. Luckily it was quite the opposite.
Overall, this whole week has been such an exciting time. I was able to have the best first impression to the workplace thanks to the whole Conscious Communications team and their support for me. I appreciate all the effort that was put into my task, I’ve heard stories of people who go to work experience and are just put into a corner and forgotten about. This experience was definitely not that. Everything that was given to me was detailed and I can tell care was put into everything. It’s changed my view on the whole PR and marketing industry. Originally, I thought it would be a boring office job but being here I’ve realised it’s very different from that. It’s opened my eyes about different pathways I might want to go into in the future and subjects I’d choose for my A-levels.
