Intern: The Non-CI Intern

By
Emma Hardie
Photography By
David Kirkland
Kia Orana, I'm Emma the second intern who will contribute to this blog until the end of 2016, and the only one who is not from the Cook Islands (and also the oldie of the interns). I am from New Zealand and finished my conjoint Bachelor's degrees in Commerce and Arts in November last year. I started at Cook Islands Tourism in March, working in the marketing department.

Since starting, I have learnt how to use InDesign and Photoshop, how data merge can make personalisation that much easier, created and updated in-house procedures, learnt the business side of social media and the importance of outstanding content, updated parts of the website, attended workshops and market updates, and learnt the most important Cook Islands Maori words (Kai = “food” is probably the best one).

While sometimes as interns we get the short straw for some tasks (stocktake, data entry), it’s sometimes a nice break when facing a creative-block and the brain is stuck for ideas for the next piece of content, or struggling to identify the missing element of a brochure you’ve been working on.

As for life in the Cook Islands, it is definitely different from home… In one word it’s “Carefree”. In New Zealand I was always worried about something, always in a hurry, always short of time, always short on sleep and ALWAYS short of “me” time.  Since living here I can change all those previous things from always to never.  It’s just how life here is.

Thanks for reading, and make sure you come back next week for Maire’s first post about working in destination development (the other side of Cook Islands Tourism).

Ka Kite from Team Tourism and have a good week.

And to conclude… here’s an image of one of my most successful social media pictures on our Facebook page so far.

 

Ladies Laughing while sitting in beach chairs in the lagoon