A few months ago, I posted a blog about a group pitch that we did for Ptarmigan Bell Pottinger, with the hope of winning a place in their student branch set up this year.
Unfortunately, my group did not win but still felt we learnt a great deal from the experience. However a member of the group that did in was an American student who just spend once semester at Leeds Met, so the winning student group were a member short. Luckily for me Adam Burns was a member of the group and offered the open space to me!
For the past few weeks we have been putting together material and today we had our first day at the Ptarmigan Bell Pottinger offices in Leeds! We met all the team and introduced ourselves and found out what our schedule for the day would be.
The first client we will be working on as the Ptarmigan Academy are Tag:Pac, a packaging design company also located in the same Leeds offices as Ptarmigan Bell Pottinger. So our first task of the day was meeting the team and finding out what they wanted from the PR and as well clients they had and how we could generate some coverage. It was exciting knowing that our team had control over our own first account and I think that together we can make the most of the opportunity.
We finished the day by showing Nathan a pitch for another perspective client and had to opportunity to ask him about a range of questions from social media in PR to our placement year. We learnt a great deal from Nathan and his knowledge of PR and hopefully will have more chances to pick his brain in the near future.
We have started a Ptarmigan Academy blog which can be found here and will be updated with our news!
There’s a lesson in here about making your own luck. Though you didn’t initially win, you were well placed to step forward when the opportunity arose.
Napoleon liked to choose lucky generals. How can we teach students to become lucky?
I think with regards to ‘how to teach luck’ you nailed it with your first comment. ‘Luck’ is what you make of it. I personally don’t believe in ‘luck’ but instead in increasing your chances of getting great opportunities. From my experience the best way to to do this is keep your options open, keep your foot is as many doors as possible and never put all your eggs in one basket. It may not be a fool proof way, but its worked for me so far!