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About Charisse's Experience!
Hey! I can’t believe it’s already been a month since starting at Pearl Lemon Group. I’m so excited to be writing about all the great things that have been happening!
Before I get started, let me introduce myself! I’m currently a rising senior in high school who is starting to get really stressed out about college applications coming up haha! During my freshman year, I started a business with a few of my friends called Collegae which connects high school students to current or recently graduated college students in order for them to gain personalized, firsthand advice without the high costs. It’s funny– now I think I need to use our service more than anything as I start to narrow down my college list! After starting Collegae, I became really interested in business, and specifically marketing. I’ve been using this summer to think about what I really want to do in life, and being a partner of Pearl Lemon Group has played a big role in that. I wanted to get some real world experience in the business/marketing field before deciding if I wanted to pursue it further in the future, and I think just this first month already has been eye opening. I’ll admit that I was pretty intimidated before working here because I felt that I didn’t have enough useful knowledge, but I quickly learned that everyone here is just as excited to help me learn as they are to help out whenever I need it!
Summer so far has been great, in fact it’s about to come to a close in the next few weeks 🙁
Earlier in the summer I visited Maui and had the best time surfing, swimming with the fish, hanging out with turtles, and just having a quick reset to clear my head before coming to work at Pearl Lemon Group.
One of the best things about Pearl Lemon Group is that it’s all remote, meaning that I can choose when I work during the day and can still spend time with my family and friends. It’s perfect!
New Things I’ve Learned
I honestly don’t even know where to begin. Working with Pearl, our head of PR, and Hanna, a fellow PR specialist, on various projects has been amazing, I’ve been learning so much from them both! Pearl has been great at showing me the ropes and teaching me how to build real connections with journalists on LinkedIn or through just cold emailing them a pitch, and I’ve refined a lot of my writing skills to best fit our varying clients’ needs. I’ve also learned how to handle criticism– especially those from our clients– and to use it to improve my work while collaborating with them to resolve any misunderstandings. Additionally, here are a few more important things I’ve learned over the past few weeks:
- Importance of work-life balance (more on this later)
- Effective communication both between clients and team members
- How to build closer relationships with people/journalists and connect in a personal way
- Knowing your audience and adjusting what you say/do based on that
- Active listening!! This is a big one in our team meetings 🙂
Thoughts on Work-Life Balance
I felt it necessary to address this as I struggled with work-life balance during my first couple of weeks here.
My biggest problem is that I just don’t know when to stop working.
When I was going through my initial training I watched and implemented many of the techniques shown in the videos to help keep my work and personal life separate. I made different chrome user profiles, got a new business WhatsApp specifically for Pearl Lemon Group, etc. However, since this is an entirely remote company, it became so easy for me to just pick up my phone after I said I was done for the day and see if I had any new emails or WhatsApp messages. Even when I was out I would be looking at my phone just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. It made it really hard to concentrate because it felt like I never had a break from work. Since I also work another part-time job, my daily routine was to: wake up, work, go to my other job and work, and then come home and work again. As one can imagine, it was not very healthy. I’ve gotten a lot better at knowing my limits and making sure to keep everything balanced. I was actually able to go on a trip to visit family in Georgia while still finding time to complete my work at Pearl Lemon Group everyday, something that I never would have been able to do prior. It was a big step and a great lesson to learn and overall improved my work too!
Photo from my trip to Georgia while still working at the same time!
Future Goals
There’s still so much left ahead but for now here are a few goals that I have in general for the next few months:
- Get faster at completing tasks and becoming overall more efficient
- Continuing to know my limits and understand that taking on too much also takes away the quality of my work. I need to be able to take a break sometimes so that I don’t get burnt out.
- Problem solving. Coming up with creative solutions to problems that occur instead of getting discouraged or slowed down by it
Conclusion
Thanks so much for reading my post! I’m so glad that I’ve been able to spend this time at Pearl Lemon Group, everyone is so great and understanding. I’ve been learning exponentially in things both related and unrelated to work, and the community here is amazing. So excited to see what the future holds for everyone here!