:: COMM :: School of Communication

Our group interviewed one graduate of 2004, called Catherine Yuen Ya Yan. She is now working in an international PR firm called Weber Shandwick, which is a leading international public relations agency, as a Consultant.

Let us first introduce her career path. In June 2004, she wrote application letter to her current company. After having the interview and written test, she had become an employee of Weber Shandwick in the Tech and Cooperate team.

Accidentally, when her internship period was going to end, there was a vacancy. (According to her description, the turn over rate is extremely low in Weber Shandwick. So the vacancy was very rare and valuable!) Due to her outstanding performance, the agency hired her as an account co-ordinator. Her main duty was to support senior officers, through which she learned a lot. In 2005, she was promoted as an Associate Consultant. And few months ago, she has become the Consultant. She reads newspaper in the morning to see if there’s any related news about her current clients and translates documents. Then in the afternoon, she will contact the mass media, usually, the journalists to see if they will be interested in her clients’ business stories.

(Left) Catherine YUEN and the interviewers

She is very pleased to work in her company because the corporate culture and atmosphere is very good. Every staff work together as a team and the turn over rate is very low. They all have developed a friendship among themselves. Moreover, working in a PR agency is her dream job. She likes to deal with different kinds of people to enrich her exposure. Thus, she finds great pleasure when she is working with her clients. The most interesting part in her job is to think of a new idea to promote her clients’ service or product. She needs to turn the facts and information of the product into a business story so as to convince the reporters. The business story not only shows the characteristics of the product but sometimes shows the trend as well. Therefore, writing a press release is not a tedious job.

Being a PR, who always work under pressure, how can Catherine balance her work life and personal life? Catherine smiled and said that, she likes dancing ballet and doing gym to release her tension. Moreover, she enjoys hanging around with friends on holidays. It makes Catherine become energetic again when back to work.

Finally, Catherine also said that, having internship is a vital step for future job seeking. She suggested PRA student is better to have a job in those international agencies more that in the local ones. As working in international agencies can have a larger extent of exposure.

One interesting story Catherine shared with us is that, she won the ‘Asian Pacific Leadership Award’ this year, and she got a free trip to Phuket in Thailand. That’s an interesting experience to Catherine as she enjoyed so much in the trip!

Lastly, we want to thank Catherine for helping us a lot! Interviewing an alumnus is not a difficult job in our eyes at the very beginning. We jotted down contacts of 5 alumni and we thought we can easily find one for an interview. However, things didn’t run smooth, we first contact one but finally she rejected our calls, and then, the other 3 didn’t answer our calls. At last, we successfully contacted Catherine. She is really a nice young lady, she even suggested us to have a lunch with her so that we can have interview her face to face. And, generous like her, paid us a free lunch as well. To conclude, Catherine really helps us a lot, and this is really a valuable and meaningful experience to all of us.

Interviewed by CHUNG Wai Nam, LAM Po Shan and LUI Ping Ping
PRA first year students
Nov 2005