This internship at Antandre was definitely an interesting experience. It was very hands on and I gained a lot of insight into what it’s like to work with a start up.
My mentality and attitude about it also changed over the course of the internship. I started off enthusiastic and determined, and ended off with the complete opposite. Before this internship I was one of those people that believed that it’s okay if an internship isn’t paid because of the experience you get out of it. Not anymore.
My boss was great. He was nice and enthusiastic, he liked my portfolio and was generally very pleased with the work I gave him. And he listened to me and never argued with me. But there are things that I wish were different, like how he gave last minute assignments with hardly any description. Once he sent me three images of engagement rings and asked me to make a post, with no specific detailed. Not what the post was about, not if he wanted them separate or combined. I had to look at different posts that looked like what I thought he might have been talking about, send it to him and wait for him to confirm. All I ended up having to do was resize the photos and this all took about 6 hours to figure out.
The company needs to expand. Currently it’s him, Joyce (who I only met with once and still don’t know what she does), Ryan who used to be an intern and is now sort of a consultant because he needs at least one other person on the team, a photography intern, and me. He is aware of this problem but you need money to get more people.
I liked that I got to do different things in this internship, like social media posts, web redesign, brand redesign, packaging design, but I’m not crazy about the work I provided. Partially it was because of what they wanted (I usually provide versions of what I think works better, and what they asked for, and they usually choose what they asked for), and partially was because I was also focusing on school.
Once I was more familiar with the way things worked and how we communicated, I saw that they liked they things I hardly worked on or didn’t work on as much as I liked to, and that didn’t motivate me to try harder. I was losing interest and had other things to focus on.
At the end I felt like everything I was doing was pointless. I didn’t want to continue doing work that I didn’t like doing, that I didn’t like the way it looked, work that I had to do that I cared way less about than my school projects over those project, and I wasn’t getting paid for any of it.
And I do feel guilty that my heart and head weren’t into it. I wish I got more out of it. It seems more of an internship for the sake of having an internship for this class than it does for experience and for my portfolio. I don’t think I want to use any of it in my portfolio, unless I make significant changes.
But after quitting my job for something like this, and seeing their enthusiasm of working with unpaid interns, and seeing as they don’t have money so they’ll keep working with unpaid interns, I don’t ever want to work an unpaid internship again and can now understand why people get mad that there even is such a thing.
I’m pretty glad it’s over. I could be using this time to work on my own projects now. Also for free.
I wish us both well.