What To Avoid When Looking For A Creative Internship - lets scope out the red flags!
If there is one thing you can do when you have the time and need to try or learn something new - it’s an internship. Internships can be the most amazing way to grow in your practice and profession. And the best thing about them, is that you can do them at any point of your professional journey - be it pre grad, post grad, or even mid career to widen your horizons.
From personal experience, undergoing a good internship allowed me to :
Develop and expand my skillset within my respective creative practice
Have a good idea of the way I want my working life to be formatted
Socialise and network
Gain confidence in myself and my abilities
And as a writer, it aided me in being published for the very first time, which was so very exciting!
However as with anything, there is always the good (as seen above), the bad and the ugly. The latter two are something I have also experienced (in a different internship), and am going to be explaining how best to scope out - and avoid…
But first, here’s a little anecdote to steer you away from doing work for free:
Heading into my final year of university, meant that I was met with the fear of graduating with no sense of direction, nor a foot on a sturdy path. I had been studying remotely and felt like I could streamline my study time so that I could take on some writing work on the side, in order to bulk out my portfolio to further look for post grad work.
After doom scrolling the job section for hours on Linkedin, I stumbled across an opening for a ‘Staff Writer’ comma internship role. Immediately I applied, and within a day I received an incredibly enthusiastic response. To which I excitedly replied and profusely thanked them for acknowledging my existence. (I wish I was lying)
An invite to call with the editor slash founder was dropped in my inbox, on which I sat for an hour and listened as they name dropped, listed their personal accomplishments and flashed their success story.
By the end of the call, I had spoken merely ten words, and somehow was offered the role.
I asked if there was any sort of compensation, only to be met with ‘you will be compensated with once in a lifetime experiences which you will then write about for future articles’. These experiences were supposedly yacht trips, Michelin meals, grand hotels and luxe stays.
And if I am being honest, because I had barely left my house in three years and am a sucker for the finer things, the sound of this had me hooked.
I accepted, hung up, and squealed with excitement, at the thought of my first big writing job. I was to be writing about wanderlust and the Avant Garde, and having my work published for the first time - over thirty pieces to be exact according to the program handbook.
Following this I endured four weeks of being told that my work wasn’t great and that I wasn’t hitting the standard of work required, all via emails ridden with spelling errors and poor grammar.
At one point I remember them even signing off their name incorrectly.
I would read the blunt comments on my work, and then amend promptly and accordingly. Only for them to forget that they had made that comment, and insist I revert my work back to the state in which I originally wrote it.
It became draining and began to drag my sense of self worth as a writer down…
So I quit politely, having spent hours writing handfuls of articles, with nothing to show for this internship besides a damaged ego and a blank calendar page.
A few months later, two of my works were published, works that I had been told didn’t meet the mark. I think people get kicks out of telling others they’re shit at things, because if everyone is the best - then no one is. And I think that perhaps this was the situation at hand.
You have probably read the above and assume I am an idiot, I have reread the above and feel like an idiot so you are not wrong. I think at the time my desire for work and acknowledgement tinted the lenses and made me naïve. Therefore for any others in a similar boat, I have collated my list of
Red Flags To Look Out For :
If it’s not a charity, they legally have to compensate you financially - run far far away from anywhere that is not paying you for your time and work, if you are not being paid, you are a volunteer.
If they constantly have internship roles posted - to me this is a no go. From this you could perhaps assume that the staff turnover rate is a short and often, inferring that the work environment or system isn’t all that. You could also interpret that the internship may be more of a free labour scheme (like in my anecdote above), whereby instead of hiring to educate and nurture, they are taking on as many people as possible in order to pump out more content - be it quality or not.
If everybody is faceless - this applies mainly to remote internships. But if you can’t put a face to a name, nor can find traces of this person or these people on the big wide web, don’t bother. Internships are to help you grow and learn under a mentor or mentorship program. You can’t nurture talent from a distance…
If they aren’t interested in you - If you are being taken on as an intern and the company doesn’t care about who you are, what you are capable of, or why you want to intern for them - then what do they care about? Again - run.
If nothing you do is ever good enough - no matter how much you try, it will never be good enough. For them that is. Don’t work with, or for people that are out to invalidate you.
Of course you can take or leave the above.
However since having personally done a not-so-legit internship in the wake of my career - which nearly put me off pursuing writing, I would thoroughly recommend to anyone searching for an internship to take note of the red flags to look out for!
Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there in the Linkedin job column, it’s like the wild wild west…
