Maverick Indonesia

Invasion of PR students

We at the Orange House, as we fondly refer to our office, aren’t used to many visitors at one time so it was a bit of a departure from business as usual when 36 Public Relations students from the Diploma Program, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Gajah Mada University (UGM) visited us last Tuesday.

It was not the first student visit to Maverick but we were no less enthusiastic because we welcome any opportunity to help people understand PR and sharing our experiences with younger minds. Who knows, we may influence them to make a career decision that could affect the rest of their lives.

The visit started off with Maverick partner Lita Soenardi highlighting Maverick internship opportunities for students. She spoke of the challenges interns would face working in a professional services firm and also the opportunities they would have in learning new things. She also explained to them the rigorous selection process of selecting interns. The students, all coming up to their third year of study that requires them to seek internships in companies, were all ears for this section.

Anyway, next to speak was Associate Hanny who talked about the similarities and differences between PR consultancies and In-house PR. Hanny also explained the advantages and disadvantages of being a practitioner in the two areas. Hanny’s presentation was concluded with what she does best: Marketing PR.

Another associate, Indri, then shared with them her experiences in Corporate Communications as well as Corporate Social Responsibility/Leadership. The session was rounded off by Riri, who’s in charge of our media monitoring department and online media monitoring and PR measurement service called Gauge, provided her insights on the importance of media tracking activities in a PR consultancy.

During the Q & A session, the UGM students seemingly could not get enough answers and kept peppering the Maverick speakers with an endless list of questions. They were most interested in Crisis Management that we had accidentally left out in our talks and peppered all the speakers with a stream of questions, forcing Hanny, Indri and Riri to recount our experiences with crisis-situations for clients, with their names left out when appropriate.

Eventually, the discussion ended up with Mavericks sharing tips on how to get about and around the profession. The students were most curious about day-to-day activities and wanted to know how the theories they had read about in their text books stacked up against reality.

Very interesting questions, especially when most PR text books are written by Westerners about Western situations that have very little to do with reality in Indonesia.