As a Public Relations student, your biggest learnings will happen on ground and understanding that completely, SCoRe took us for a two-day induction with Ketchum Sampark. The office is at Fort in Mumbai. What followed was a rich learning experience for two days from the experts in Finance, Corporate, Technology, Media Management and Crisis Management apart from several brilliant case studies.

Related: Life at SCoRe

Our day one started with the brief from Jayashree Chaudhary, Chief Talent Officer at Ketchum Sampark. Considering us as her prospective employees, she briefed us about Ketchum Sampark. She also introduced us to the professionals who were to address us for the rest of the day.

Girish Dikey, Partner and Financial expert at Ketchum came to address us first along with Shreela Roy, Senior Account Director. From mutual funds to shares to market capital, they both gave us a picture of what financial PR would look like. The highlight of the session was the discussion about DBS’s – Digi Bank, which was an example of digital disruption in the banking sector with innovation at the core. Finance used to be a foreign language to me but after this session, I can at least be a part of the conversations about finance.

With Girish Dikey and Shreela Roy

Jayashree also made it a point to give us the opportunity to interact with young achievers at Ketchum as well. The next two who came in were a set of young achievers who never cautious of taking up challenges and never missed out an opportunity to learn something new – Faizan Aboli and Khushal Devera. Their case study of Ujjivan Bank was as inspiring as their life stories of learning and growing.

Girish Huria, President of Ketchum Sampark joined us for lunch and it was a pleasure listening to the words of wisdom this experienced man had to share with us. He interacted with us on day two also. As much as he is a good speaker, he is also a very good listener. So it was a two-way conversation with us sharing our thoughts about the PR industry and him in return sharing his viewpoints. The highlight of the day was our interaction with NS Rajan, managing director of Ketchum Sampark. He shared with us the case studies of the crises he handled (we asked for it) – but for us, it was about listening to stories of success from a man who is a personification of ethics and values. The two hours with him flew by. Day one came to a wrap with a three-hour session on Digital PR and Social Media with Avijit Singh, VP of Digital at Ketchum Sampark. From explaining the difference between influencers and bloggers to evaluating a digital campaign – he covered all aspects of digital PR for us.

With NS Rajan, Managing Director

With Girish Huria, President

With Avijit Singh, VP – Digital

After a long day of immense learning, we came back with fresh minds next day to learn more to be greeted by Girish Huria – again – to our pleasure though. After Girish, we had a very engaging and interesting session with Suman Das Sarma, Senior Partner at Ketchum and the media guru at Ketchum. He gave us all the necessary tips and learnings to manage media in our profession. Kevin Braganza and Krishnamoorthy took us through an interesting case study of Ambuja Cements.

We then had a session with Manish Mallick, who spent a major part of his career in corporate communication side, giving us insights from both sides. We also had a session on making a press release and media lists with Piyush and Bhoomi Patel. Day two at Ketchum came to an end with a wrap-up session by Jayashree where she showed us interesting internal communication tools used by Ketchum worldwide. The delight of the session was the video on Rob Flaherty’s wall sketching of 90 years of Ketchum.

With Suman Das Sarma, Senior Partner

With Kevin Braganza and Krishnamoorthy R

With Manish Mallick

Key learnings and takeaways from Ketchum:

1. Table of Contents

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   It is important to understand and figure out what will give you maximum exposure at the beginning of your career

2. Choose skills and think of your entire career and life as a learning

3. If you chose to not look up to or look down on people, it will help you to be very objective

4. To crack a press release, follow the writing pattern of the journalist you are pitching

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog site.

– Julia Joseph

Julia is a part of Class of 2018 of the Post Graduate Programme in Public Relations at SCoRe. She is a Master’s Degree in English Literature, and has worked with The Promise Foundation of PR prior to joining SCoRe.

During her PG in PR, she interned with Edelman PR, New Delhi

She can be reached at @TheJuliaJoseph on Twitter and as here on LinkedIn.