Through undergrad and grad school, I did many internships.

When I first came to college, I had no idea really what internships were. I attended an arts high school and had a school experience where I didn’t worry about internships or extracurriculars, as I didn’t plan on attending an Ivy League. I thought those experiences were something that weren’t of interest to me, and I ended up having a normal childhood in that sense where I explored and did the things I liked because I simply was interested in them, not because of some school or larger life plan. But when I moved to New York City for college to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology, I ended up realizing what exactly an internship was.

I’m a first generation college student, so it’s not like I had parents who could help me out in giving advice when it came to a career. When I was an undergrad I ended up doing a grand total of seven internships, all of which were unpaid. I was unable to land a paid internship during my undergrad career, which was devastating for me. It’s not that easy as some people make it out to be, especially if you’re first gen. I didn’t know how to properly make a resume until after I had graduated and was in the middle of a gap year. I didn’t even have a job until I was a sophomore in college—I’d never had a need for money, as I didn’t go out or spend money, until then.

Here’s my internship journey.

The first steps in fashion and editorial.

My first-ever internship was sent to me by a friend. A common thing at FIT, especially for those in the Fashion Business Management major, to seek out specific internships, and the forecasting company Fashion Snoops is one of them. They put out a call on Instagram for an intern for their home department, I applied, interviewed, and ended up becoming the intern for the small team. This was my first internship and it was in fashion/home forecasting, and I found out throughout my experience that I didn’t really care for the work I was doing. Internships are a time to explore career paths, but having this on my resume helped open up doors because I had experience.

I did learn I liked writing, but when it was more flexible. COVID hit and I began applying to editorial internships, and ended up doing three of them at the same time. While I was doing the Fashion Snoops work, I ended up also working at New Perspectives Theatre Company as an intern for administrative work, and at the Sundress Academy for the Arts as an Editorial Intern. These experiences ended up becoming the foundation of my resume, and I learned a ton of valuable skills that took me to the next step.

After that, I took on several writing and intern positions with online publications creating content. This created the building blocks that ultimately led to this blog and establishing a career in freelance writing, especially with film criticism, and I think these writing gigs for smaller websites, blogs, and online only magazines helped build up a solid foundation. I also began learning SEO through these publications, which has been so beneficial for my career as a whole.

Nonprofit and marketing spaces were my next step.

New Perspectives and Sundress were my first two nonprofit internships, and considering I was in the fashion spaces before this, I began to realize I wanted to go into something that makes a difference in the world. Kudos to those who want to work in fashion at the end of the day, but I realized I couldn’t ethically agree with a lot of practices going on. I realized I wanted to go into more nonprofit spaces, so I began volunteering a bit more to see what kind of organizations were out there in the world.

So what ended up happening next is that I got bumped up from an intern at New Perspectives to a Programs Assistant, which gave me more time to learn how to use things like Canva and Squarespace, which gave me even more valuable skills for my career down the road. When I entered graduate school, I then took a grant writing course that was designed to directly work with a local organization to write grants for them, especially BIPOC-led ones that didn’t have equal opportunities compared to other nonprofits.

There, I ended up writing multiple grants throughout the course of the semester and attained that skill as well. It wasn’t an internship per say, but it was valuable work experience that could benefit my grant writing and freelance writing career as a whole.

In grad school I landed bigger internships.

When I entered grad school, I planned on continuing my career I’d already pursued. Because of my internships, I established a solid marketing and freelance writing career, which was creating a steady stream of income that paid the bulk of my expenses. It even paid off my grad school tuition with some extra money each month! However, once I realized I was interested in some new spaces and wanted to expand my connections and network, I ended up looking on the market yet again.

The summer of 2023, when I am writing this, I ended up interning with Smithsonian Books for six months as a Marketing Intern and with the StoryCenter as an Administrative/Programs Intern. Because of these experiences, I delved deeper into nonprofit museum publishing and what it takes to get a book out there into the world, as well as nonprofit storytelling advocacy. I think these experiences, although they were unpaid, ended up expanding my perspective of the world and my professional place in it.

So yeah, I did a lot throughout the years and in a small amount of time. I used to be sad that I could never land a paid internship, but by cutting my expenses and having the privileges of living at home for grad school and during COVID, I was able to afford doing these. I’m ambitious and knew what it took, but I also wanted to push myself throughout the years. I have one more year left in school, so we’ll see where the winds take me!

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