By Mythily Nair, Intern
As my time at Hoffman draws to a close, I’ve learned that PR is not what I thought it was. Working in an agency is a crash course in time management, deadline management, client communications and internal communications with my manager, team leads, senior leadership and more. However, the difference from my first day to today is palpable.
These changes didn’t come without their challenges. I began with struggling to get tasks done at a reasonable time — I took three-times as long as other colleagues to get a single deliverable done, I wasn’t very good at communicating my bandwidth and I took on more work than I could handle.
Now, I’ve become more responsible, resilient and have learned that I have a tangible ability to learn and unlearn, effectively unleashing my potential. My ability to mold myself was both surprising and reassuring, knowing full well that I am more than capable of changing to suit the environment, the accounts, the clients and my account managers’ needs.
Going forward, I’m hoping to maintain that attitude of learning and unlearning, because I believe it will be my greatest asset. I hope to ensure that I get even sharper at my pace and the quality of my deliverables — both aspirations I am sure will get better at with time and practice. And I believe that’s all that matters.
Drafting pitches and social media copy were my favorite tasks to do while at Hoffman. On one of my accounts, we worked on a music festival event, and drafting the pitch for it remains one of my favorite memories from my time at Hoffman. Social media, too, involved joking around with my colleagues and producing killer copy that was both eye-catching but also meaningful enough to convey the client’s message and their product.
Like my manager Rachel said, communicate, communicate, COMMUNICATE! Whether it be how much you’ve got left of a task, if you’ve done the outreach or if you have questions (no matter how stupid), it’s always best to keep people in the loop. You may feel like you’re overcommunicating (trust me, I know how this feels), but it’s always better for people to know where you are with something than wonder. Also, a very Hoffman-specific hack: always tag the email aliases. You’ll thank me later for that one.
I believe that storytelling itself is an art, one that humans have passed down orally for millennia. Translating stories for other people, or clients, is an art unto itself. I have always enjoyed taking difficult topics and explaining them in layman’s terms; it was often my best method of studying in school and college. Tech PR, in that sense, is no different.
Hoffman has undoubtedly changed my view of what I wanted to do with my career. I had thought that I made a risky decision specializing in the deep tech/tech PR world, but it turned out to be a brilliant decision. Tech PR has opened up a world of possibilities for me, from understanding deep tech and machinery, to learning how to effectively communicate about niche and conventionally “boring” client and client products. That only means that the possibilities moving forward are endless.
