My First Internship
A podcast about ancient aliens…
Sometimes it’s easy to forget our less glamorous roots, but I wanted to remind you that when you’re just starting out, sometimes the jobs/internships aren’t necessarily ideal. While I am grateful for my internship experience at large companies and flashy places, I wanted to share a moment of gratitude for my very first college internship.
My first year at NYU, I was eager to get experience in the industry outside of my classwork. I didn’t really have any film experience so I mustered up the best version of a resume based on my high school accomplishments (and my minimal college experience), and started applying to all the major companies. I realized my naivete when the NBCU and Disney and Warner Brothers and Paramount and Sony rejections started rolling in and then quickly shifted my focus to smaller companies. After a quick and desperate Google search, I stumbled upon EntertainmentCareers.net. I was elated to see hundreds of internships at companies of every size. I spent my energy mass applying on that site and took the first job that got back to me.
Out of kindness (and in case I signed an NDA, which I’m almost positive I didn’t), I won’t be naming the company. For the purposes of this post, let’s refer to them as the “Alien Production Company” or “APC” for short. To add a little bit of context, it was the early days of Covid, so this internship was fully remote. APC was a small production company with an emphasis on “niche” programming. After a few phone calls with my supervisor, I realized this was a company with maybe 2 employees and no organization whatsoever. I didn’t really have a title or department, rather, I was just a general helper to the one woman who contacted me.
They mainly needed help building out their social media presence. The majority of my tasks involved creating mock-ups for Instagram and Facebook posts on Canva. I recently looked back at my creations and they are nothing short of horrendous. I definitely did not know what I was doing and misconstrued Gen Z social media prowess with an actual background in graphic design and real social media skills.
During the internship, my supervisor and I would often have long conversations about her theories on ancient archeology or the mysteries of ancient civilizations. They were fascinating phone calls and as a fan of History Channels “Ancient Aliens” growing up, I was often intrigued. She made a good argument! But needless to say, it was not exactly what I had signed up for. Definitely interesting, but not the production company experience I was seeking.
I finished strong, thanked her for the opportunity, scrounged together three professional-sounding bullet points for my resume, and returned to the process of applying to almost anything. I wanted to share this experience to remind you that we all have to start somewhere. And just because these types of early internships may not be visible on LinkedIn anymore, they were the foundations for our resumes that got us the next thing that led to the next thing and so on. (With that being said… maybe you can be a little bit more picky than me. Unless you are interested in ancient aliens then I’d be happy to recommend you!)
I’ll leave you with this advice: it’s okay to take almost anything when you’re just starting out. Internships are meant for you to explore and try out areas of the industry to later help you narrow down what you really want to do. As long as the situation is safe and you’re gaining some kind of experience, I say go for it.