Week 3 at Purpol Marketing by Intern Emily Marks

This week has been a week of new experiences.

I began the week by editing down and reading through some drafts of questions for a new bid Purpol are working on. It has been an eye opening experience and I feel I have learnt a lot about the structure and content of bids and also the difficulties of writing them. Editing back one of the questions from 6 pages to 5/4 and a half was a lot harder than I thought it would be – when Denise sent me the documents on Monday morning I thought I would have it edited by lunch time but I underestimated the difficulty of cutting down a bid when everything seems so relevant.

I have always considered my editing skills to be good and often had to edit a few thousand words out of my essays before handing them in (my dissertation was 12 thousand words initially and it needed to be 8000), but being new and unfamiliar to the contents and terminology in the world of bid writing and construction, I found it far harder to know what needed to be cut out and what needed to stay in order to keep the content of the bid the same. Denise is very concise in her writing and every sentence seemed to make a valid contribution to the question, making it difficult to decide on what could be cut out. I can definitely appreciate how difficult it is to fit everything that needs to be said into just a few pages! Needless to say, I did finish editing it down and gave feedback on four other questions as well.
The process of reading through and editing various questions has really helped me to familiarise myself with the language and contents of a bid and I am excited to learn more in the future.

On Wednesday I graduated from Bath Spa University which was at once exciting to have the hard work of my friends and myself recognised in the beautiful Bath Abbey, and a bit sad to say goodbye to Bath and university friends at least for now. However, I have now completely finished university, at least where my undergraduate degree is concerned and I am pleased to say I didn’t fall over when I went up to get my certificate!

Thursday and Friday have been dedicated to working on my direct marketing campaign project which I will be presenting to the team on Monday (when I finally get to meet everybody!), collating all of my modular build research into one big report and beginning the research for the next lot of whitepapers I need to write next week!

The direct marketing campaign project was something else that was very new to me. Writing and researching the whitepapers from the past two weeks have certainly given me a good understanding of marketing, but I still had to find out what promotional mechanisms and measurement metrics were! It has been a really fun little project to do and has allowed me to be creative so hopefully, I have produced something good! Only time will tell…

It has been a very hectic week, with lots of new experiences but it is exciting to think about everything I have learnt so far and how much is still to come – this internship is providing me with so much experience for the future!