From Intern to Consultant: Lessons from My First Year in PR
Written by Audrey Manuputty
I first walked into Praxis as an intern in 2024 with the particular mix of eagerness and cluelessness that I think is universal to internships. I watched the consultants at work, the pace of it, the switching between accounts, the way they could talk about a multinational mining’s stakeholder landscape in one breath and a gaming brand’s media seeding plan in the next, and I thought: I don’t fully understand what’s happening here, but I really want to.
That feeling stuck. When the opportunity came to return as a full consultant in June 2025, I said yes without much deliberation. I knew the environment. I knew the demands. I knew the culture was rigorous and the learning curve was real. I came back anyway, which in retrospect tells me something about who I am and what I was looking for.
"Now it's been a year. An actual year, not an internship sprint. And the honest reflection is: I understood even less than I thought I did."
From Intern to Consultant: The Same Desk, A Different Weight
There is something strange and clarifying about returning to a place you already know as something new.
As an intern, I had access to the mechanics of agency life: the press distributions, the media lists, the meeting recaps, but I was operating at the edge of it. I was learning the vocabulary without yet being asked to speak in full sentences. The consultants around me were managing client relationships, navigating sensitive issues, making judgment calls under pressure. I was watching, absorbing, occasionally contributing. It was valuable. It was also, in some fundamental way, low-stakes.
Coming back as a consultant changed the texture of everything. What had once felt like a place I was visiting became a place I was responsible to. Client work was no longer something I supported from the side, it was something I owned. Deadlines were real, expectations were real, and when something needed to be done well and quickly, it’s only right to take the initiative.
That shift from observer to participant is probably the defining psychological experience of my first year. The desk looks the same, yet the weight is different.
The Work That Shaped Me Most
If I had to identify the three experiences that moved the needle the most on how I think and work, they would be these.
Media Relations
This year, I attended fifteen media engagements. These ranged from casual journalist lunches to afternoon media briefings to a full site visit to a nickel mine alongside international press. As an intern I had been in the room during some of these kinds of interactions, helping with logistics or taking notes from the side. As a consultant, I was at the table, expected to engage, build rapport, and actually be useful to the relationship.
What I learned across all of these is that media relations is not primarily about coverage. It is about understanding how journalists think, what pressures they operate under, what stories they are genuinely curious about, and how to be useful to them without being transactional. The best conversations I had this year with journalists were ones where nothing was being pitched. Those conversations built the credibility that made the pitching possible later.
Public Affairs
I carried this most intensively across a sovereign wealth fund and a multinational mining client; both operating in high-visibility, politically sensitive environments. On one account, I was PIC for a high-profile renewable energy initiative. The work spanned drafting communications materials, mapping stakeholder engagement with civil society, managing crisis communications around governance narratives, and monitoring media sentiment across multiple issues. On the other, I produced political intelligence reports, profiled parliamentary commission members, and helped prepare anticipatory documents ahead of legislative hearings.
This was a different kind of communications work: fast paced, more careful, deeply attuned to context. You are mapping a landscape and helping a client navigate it. As an intern, I had not been exposed to this side of the work at all. It was the most unexpected part of the year, and probably the most formative. It expanded what I thought this job could be.
The Floater Circuit
Moving across accounts spanning professional sports, consumer gaming, life insurance, retail banking, telecommunications, and digital payments. At first felt like being scattered, but over time I realized it was doing something valuable: building pattern recognition. You start to see the underlying architecture of communications work beneath the surface differences across industries. The floater experience compressed what might have taken years to notice into twelve months. As an intern I had been a floater by default, never deep enough in any account to see the full picture. This time the breadth was intentional, and what I took from it was entirely different.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then
I know now that speed and quality are not opposites in this industry, both are demanded simultaneously. The skill is learning to produce good work quickly enough that it still lands. A perfectly crafted press release delivered two days late is worth less than a solid one delivered on time. Calibrating that trade-off takes reps to develop, and I have more reps now than I did.
I know that context is everything in strategic communications. The same message lands differently depending on who delivers it, when, through which channel, and in response to what. A lot of my growth this year came from learning to ask more and better context questions before I started writing anything. As an intern, I often jumped straight to execution. As a consultant, I learned to slow down at the front end so the back end could move faster.
I know that the variety of this job is not a bug, it is a feature. Working across fintech, gaming, energy, sovereign wealth, and tourism in a single year forced me to develop intellectual flexibility I couldn’t have built any other way. I am more curious, more adaptable, and more comfortable with ambiguity than I was twelve months ago, and more than I was when I first walked in as an intern.
"A year in as a consultant is not long enough to be wise, but it is long enough to see the shape of what comes next."
And I know that I am still early. One full year in, I have a much clearer map of what I don’t yet know. About stakeholder strategy, about crisis communications at scale, about what it takes to genuinely lead a client relationship. That is not discouraging. It’s orienting, it’s exciting.
When I think about the version of me who showed up as an intern in 2024, curious but not yet sure this was really the world I wanted to be in, and then the version who came back anyway in June 2025, and then the version sitting here now, a full year into the real thing, I feel something I can only describe as quiet gratitude.
The decision to return made sense at the time in a way I couldn’t fully articulate. It makes much more sense now. The work was varied and demanding and occasionally overwhelming and almost always interesting. The clients I supported ranged from the lighthearted to the genuinely high-stakes. The journalists, colleagues, clients, and industry figures I spent time with this year made the professional world feel larger and more interconnected than I had imagined.
I came back because I wanted to understand what I had glimpsed. I understand more of it now, enough to know how much more there is to learn, and to feel genuinely ready to keep going.
One year down, a plenty more to go.
Audrey Manuputty is an Account Coordinator at Praxis Indonesia, specilized in public relations and public affairs.
