The Internship

Starting out Somewhere

Search, nothing, search, interview, search, land…something like that. For anyone who has ever wanted, searched, had an interview, I’m sure it went something like that. Unless of course you were lucky enough to have the hook-up at a sweet company for your internship, in that case, no one likes you.

Everyone comes from somewhere, but where they end up is a different story. I come from a small town, so small that the best way to describe it is that it’s in the middle of nowhere. “You know where Utica is, ok, do you know where Binghamton is? Perfect, find the middle and there you have it!” I graduated with 159 other kids, I’ll never forget the number or the girl who made it 159. She felt graduating wasn’t important so didn’t want to. Her name shall remain anonymous, but it’s something that I’ve always remembered.

The Background

In high school I never knew what I wanted to do until my junior year. I had been the student who always coasted by. I was smart enough (I’m still very smart, much smarter than I was), to get by on sitting in class, getting a decent grade on a test and being perfectly happy. I knew that I always wanted to be involved in sports but when it came time to start looking in to a career path, the sports world is saturated, absolutely saturated. When there are several hundred new positions each year in the field, and thousands of incoming graduates, not a lot of opportunity. But then again, that’s pretty much every field nowadays. So my junior year, I took a sports marketing class, I fell in love. It involved sports but it also involved marketing. What was marketing, what was advertising, what did promotions entail, what was this world? I immediately found something to become passionate about.

Granted it involved sports, but it was something more than that to me. So after that class I started researching more and more about what marketing and advertising was. I became more and more interested and when it was time to go to school, it was marketing that I would major in. Went through school and still practiced my same practices from high school, barely study and skeeve by. I found that if I wanted to go through school with decent grades, I’d need to show that I had a valuable skill set. I needed to prove future employers that even if I wasn’t book smart, I had a great work ethic and knowledge. I’ve always been someone who can prove my worth through my work, not my books.

So in my junior year of school, I sought out internships. I started looking and found one at a small company. I was a marketing intern who didn’t do a lot, but I did enough to get a taste. Once that ended, I found another writing player articles for a company out on the west coast. I was writing for NFL players, yes, that’s correct. I have written player articles for Odell Beckham Junior, Keenan Allen and a few other pros at this point. Pretty dope. After the conclusion of that internship, I interned for a startup company. I got to know what it’s like to search for funding, to start from the literal bottom and find out how to go up. At this point, it seems like the company is still struggling to get off the floor. But it was a great experience and I wouldn’t change it! Following that, I got an internship at a full-service ad agency. Awesome, flat out awesome. I learned a lot about deadlines, collaboration, different departments, you name it. Great experience at every place I interned at.

Starting out Sucksssss

Pretty much everyone starts out somewhere, it’s what you can do with that knowledge and what you can run with. I realized that I’d never want to work for a startup, yes it was great experience, but it was a lot of hard work. I found that I want to work in an ad agency or another type of agency that resembles that. There’s a lot out there, but you won’t know until you try it. Don’t give up hope when starting out from college or if your grades suck, I never made deans list and I got a job right out of college. I know a lot of people who are still searching for jobs and scored way higher on tests than I did. Don’t let books be the only reflection of how smart you are!