An Interview With Myself: 900,000 Seconds of Internship with Artzap Studio
An internship is an investment for the future. It is an important step that will take you away from school, and a step closer to your chosen career. An internship will also improve the skills you need to become a professional and to do better in the career that you have chosen.
It has been my privilege to share what I experienced as an intern in Artzap Studio, I am Alyssa Maac, a 4th-year Multimedia Arts student from the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde and if this was a pageant show, I’d like to share a quote by Mark Twain, “the secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
Before I applied in Artzap Studio, I had a lot of questions in my mind because every 4th-year student in our school feared to choose the wrong place for their training but to overcome that fear, I asked myself the following questions;
- Where do I want to work?
- What do I want to do?
- Which part of my course do I want to focus on?
- How do I start?
Based on these, I made a checklist of companies with complete details of location, industry and contact details. I also picked companies based on the criteria of being fresh, professional, multifaceted, and dedicated; to parallel with my desire to become industry-ready since I needed the experience to land a job. As a result, It led me to Artzap Studio, because they have all the things that I want for my internship company.
After I sent my application for an internship, I was fortunate enough to be accepted and given the opportunity to do various types of work for both internal and external. Internal works are tasks that involve anything that is intended for Artzap Studio’s use. Some of the works that I did for this category were collaterals and infographics for blog posts. On the other hand, external works are tasks that include the services for a real client which made me glad and nervous at the same time because they entrusted me with this kind of work and mostly, the outputs that I produced were graphic designs that fall under the multimedia industry. These tasks tested my versatility, which is a very essential skill for a multimedia artist.
My training with Artzap Studio took me a step closer to the industry and made me experience important things that I need in the future. Since part of my criteria for choosing an internship company needs to be fresh, this means that I wanted to work with young and brilliant professionals because the work environment is really important for me. It didn’t matter if I was not with the industry giants because I was already satisfied with being surrounded by a cooperative and collaborative group of people in Artzap Studio. We always tried to keep a high level of open-mindedness and respect with a bit of fun on the side. I was also surprised that most of them, if not all, are in their 20s, yet they’re great at their game and side by side, they compete with other agencies. No wonder they have an amazing rapport. They did not only teach me how to do new things but they also showed me how to be professional, smart, innovative, equipped, and flexible.
They made me feel like I was Luke Skywalker because of how they nurtured my talents, creativity, and critical thinking. It was similar to Star Wars because of the mentorship style. I had to trust the process but I also needed to be flexible in order to jump from one task to another. This also taught me to always think one step ahead, to always be ready and prepared for anything in my way; and that it doesn’t matter if I made mistakes along the way. I learned that there’s no room for laziness, only a huge room for improvement.
In college, I learned to work smart, not hard and I held onto it ever since. Although being a college student also meant juggling different tasks at a time; I, on the other hand, constantly tried to remove the word “cramming” and “busy” from my vocabulary because there is always a time for everything. I never bring my work at home unless it is really necessary because I need to balance my work and my personal life. The time that I spent with the people in Artzap Studio taught me that I can achieve this balance through time management and organization, by allocating time for each task and separating the big chunks into smaller digestible ones.
Given the opportunity to share what I learned, here are the top 3 memorable moments that I had with Artzap Studio that taught me a lot of things:
The first one happened on my first day with the company. I had big expectations for everything; for Artzap Studio, my workmates, my first tasks, and for myself. It turned out that my first task was to make a cover concept in two hours for a big potential client which served as a learning curve for me because usually, it would take me hours to think and do my research just for a single concept.
The second memorable moment that I experienced was two weeks into the internship. We presented our concepts and designs to a big client and I couldn’t believe that in those two weeks I was already doing this kind task and I was actually thrilled by it.
Lastly, what I experienced three days before the last day of my training because Artzap Studio was separated into two teams and was given the task to come up with a social media campaign proposal which became a friendly competition against each other. I was challenged with this task because we only had a short amount of time to prepare for our presentation and because experts were also invited to decide which of the two teams had the best presentation. In the end, our team lost but I felt victorious because of the knowledge we acquired. These memories really left a mark that I will treasure forever.
What I experienced as an intern at Artzap Studio taught me a lot of things. From different aspects, skills, characteristics, and qualities of both the work and the people, the whole experience helped me improve as a person, strengthened my work ethics, and boosted my self-esteem, which is important for me because I have low confidence.
Artzap Studio was like a pair of reading glasses for me because they helped me get a clearer vision of what I should expect from the industry. My training in Artzap Studio is also a great addition to my resume since companies are looking for applicants who have experience, and experience is synonymous to success.
That 900,000 seconds with Artzap Studio was life-changing because even if everything stayed the same, I know that I changed in terms of skills, abilities, qualities and work ethics, and I could even say that I leveled up and that is why I am glad that I took that first step towards my goal.
