UniSA Internships - Stephanie Hoi Ching Wu

Welcome Stephanie
Stephanie Wu joined our Media and Communications Team for her University of South Australia Bachelor of Communication and Media internship course for Semester 2, 28 February - 6 June 2023.

Stephanie completed 80 hours onsite at the Connecting Up office, (2 days a week for 7.5 hours Wednesdays and Fridays). A personal portfolio link to the SAcommunity blog articles published by Stephanie is here>> https://sacommunity.org/blog/20901 

Personal Biography
Stephanie is a final year student, studying a Bachelor of Communication and Media at the University of South Australia, majoring in social media. Originally from Hong Kong, she has been in Adelaide for a year and between her university studies, has found a passion for K-Pop and dance, including Hip Hop and the art of choreography.  

She is currently interning in the SAcommunity program in the Media and Communication Team at Connecting Up, Infoxchange. Stephanie chose Infoxchange to gain more real-world experience. She also wishes to learn more about designing and using tech tools like Canva, BeePro, and office software such as Office365 to develop the technical skills required in the workplace.  

Stephanie’s future goal is to provide media representation for a professional dance company. She plans to apply the skills acquired during her internship to enhance her career. Stephanie’s key focus is on leveraging her design and social media skills to raise interest, and awareness, and promote the value of dance among new audiences, through effective promotion and communication strategies. 

Stephanie watches Volunteer David and Intern Nicole demonstrate phone call techniques

Work Experience - personal branding, telephone training 
Stephanie had the opportunity to participate in personal branding session, telephone training, and all staff events in person. The personal branding includes personal biography and elevator pitch practice to let Stephanie introduce herself, talk about why she came here to do the internship and what she wants to do in the future. Stephanie undertook telephone training to learn how to communicate with non-profit organisations and ask their permission to create a blog on the SAcommunity website.  

Infoxchange Mentor Meeting Experience 
As part of her internship, Stephanie met onsite with her self-chosen Infoxchange staff mentor Eric Jenkins on the 19th of April 2023.

Stephanie's five take-away messages from this meeting were: 
Understanding Eric's position: "Eric Jenkins is an account manager; his role is to assist customers' problems and do his best to solve their problems.

1. The few things to become a good professional communication and media person are to have a good foundation of communication skills have strong skills to communicate with consumers, find out what might be useful, practice, and make sure I have the basic skills of the required tools. 

2. The daily work of Eric has two different main areas which are assistance to the customers and working for improvement for the connecting website.  

3. The reason Eric chooses to do the account manager is he was working in customer service for a few years before, and he wants to do something like the job he did before, he wants to take the skills and what he learned before to put in the account manager that positions.  

4. The two values that Eric committed to is commitment, it is an important value when we are paid to do the job, we should have responsibility. Another value is we need to stick to our principle which is what we think is right and what we think is wrong. 

5. The best advice Eric gave me to plan a career is I need to think about where I want to take my career in 2 years or five years ago, look at the job listing that I am interested in, and what the employer wants and tries to think about what I interest."  
Training and Development 
SAcommunity staff member Eric Jenkins, Interns Nicole Cheng, Rhea Rao, Gilianne Restor and Volunteers Rex Porter, David Webb and Waleed Sayeed have all committed their time through peer-to-peer capacity-building in directly working with Stephanie side-by-side throughout her internship. Assisting her in completing her internship program units, by helping her with translating, understanding, practicing and undertaking activities.  

Training and Education Webinars
Stephanie has also learned about different aspects of media and communication in the not-for-profit sector, through selecting from the training webinars offered on the Connecting Up Digital Learning Platform. This online educational platform provides a variety of live and recorded webinars, webcons, and workshops to assist community organisations with their missions, and enhance students professional development.

K-POP Modern Dancing in Adelaide  
"This is my first blog written in the SAcommunity. My interest is dancing, I danced K-POP for one year, since I went to Adelaide. In this blog, I talked about what is K-POP, why I am interested in K-POP, how dance helps people connect, why people connect with dance, and talked about if people are interested in K-POP dance, and what dance studios they can go to learn dancing."  

"I also wrote [the July Calendar] about the Willunga Almond Bloss Festival 29-30 July 2023, An Experience of Internation Students - Hoi Ching Wu, Traditional and Bush Dance Society (ATBDS) Annual Ball 29 July 2023, and Light Creatures - Adelaide ZOO 29 June-23 July 2023." 


Interns Stephanie Hoi Ching Wu, Ada Wing Yi Wong, Nicole Cheng, Rhea Rao, Volunteer Stathis Avramis, Intern Gilianne Restor and Jordana Izquierdo and Volunteer Camille Sze Pui Ko 


[Edited.]