I'm Often Asked About PR Internships, Here is What it Takes at Caster

Hayley Keen has been a member of the Caster team since October 2017, when she and I crossed paths by accident and I saw a spark in Hayley that I knew would make her an excellent match for our intern program. What started as a quick-turn-around, high-demand project became a four-semester internship and the start of her PR career.

Hayley was swift to set her own trajectory from there. Throughout her tenure at Caster, Hayley has consistently demonstrated a keen attention to detail and an impressive learnedness, proving herself a true asset for her valuable contributions to PR projects, social media work, research, and even pitching - skills she'll carry through her career and skills we look for in any interview.

A PR internship—what it takes

Internships are reliant on two things: the people who take them and those who provide them.

At Caster, we touch all sides: We have hired our interns with no PR experience; we have hired interns based on outside internships, and we have worked with URI to develop a curated PR internship program. It’s been a commitment.

Admittedly, we’ve had good years and bad. Sometimes, it’s on us. Sometimes, we just can’t carve out the time or resources to deliver the goods, and sometimes we’ve found we just can’t deal with those who lack ambition (e.g., those who call in sick and then run into Kim at the local coffee shop or those who fall asleep at the conference room table). Just as 90 percent of startups fail, so do internships—but that also means 10 percent of them succeed.

Hayley might have crossed our path by accident, but her internship here proved incredibly purposeful—for her and for us. Hayley’s internship helped us develop a stellar learning-incubator to act as a dedicated training path for becoming an account coordinator at an agency (because we’ve learned that nearly every account person we’ve ever hired has lacked agency exposure). Simultaneously, our relationship with Hayley and URI has helped us advocate our internship program to other PR students, building our recruitment initiative to develop a stronger bench.

The results have been incredibly rewarding for all of us.

A perfect PR match

From the start of her internship, Hayley quickly became the go-to at Caster, because she is responsible, reliable, and can pivot to perform a variety of duties with ease. Hayley perseveres and achieves the goals of a project, and she is genuinely excited when she learns something new. She has continually proven that she can own more pieces of projects and has demonstrated, without a doubt, that she is someone who will have her teams’ backs.

As much as Caster would love to lay claim to all of this, all we did was nurture the PR maven inside an already incredibly bright young person—and URI recognized the same things Caster did as the Harrington School at URI awarded Hayley the PR Excellence Award in the Leadership category.

Every member of the Caster office can attest that there could be no better recipient for this award. Hayley will be missed greatly in our RI-based office, but we appreciate her ambitious draw to New York City. We wish her great things on what is sure to be a striking career ahead.

Congrats, Hayley!