On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 12:45 AM, Joe Coughlin <[email protected]> wrote: > But the questions are these: are you being used to do work that would > otherwise go to someone they studio would pay and who does the internship > favor? It should favor the intern, not the studio.
An intern is an extra set of hands around a studio or production office, which benefits both the intern and the facility where he/she works > Your internship was valuable. You didn't sit in a bullpen until a PA told > you to go on a Starbucks run or run off to the copy center to wait for > copies all day and shuttle them back and forth. Sometimes that was exactly what my internship was. Making copies. Buying liquor for the post-show parties I wasn't invited to. Other times I was able to do more interesting/involved things. I happened to have had genuine practical engineering experience in college, so eventually the guy at CNBC West who did most of the in-house engineering let me tinker a bit once I showed him I knew what a waveform and vectorscope were for. But at first I did little more than answer phones and try to learn through the osmosis of a cable news network office and studio. The hours were insane, the traffic sucked, and that's the way every internship I've ever heard about in Hollywood is described. > But this is the kind of > bullshit that happens sometimes. Big business shouldn't be allowed to > exploit eager college kids like that. Will it mean fewer internships? Yes, > but it will lead to higher quality internships, I believe. It'll lead to fewer internships and, worse, leave more college kids struggling to find work. Look, for me, my internship was my foot in the door. From my summer at CNBC I established connections and was later hired as an NBC Page where I expanded my network, then continued making connections and ultimately worked for five solid years on nearly 50 different TV shows without a break. I was atypical because I wanted to do the whole Hollywood thing. Most of my classmates at my college in Washington state remained in the state and took really crappy internships with the local affiliates, where there was little to do but the aforementioned coffee retrieval. But the value for them was the same as mine -- establishing industry connections. Many of my friends who took crappy local TV internships 20 years ago are now senior anchors and producers and directors of those same local stations. An internship in the entertainment industry isn't going to be glamorous, and rarely will it involve more than three active brain cells until the intern builds a relationship of trust with those around him/her. The hours will be long, the work boring and pedantic, and when you graduate to your first paying job in Hollywood, the hours will be long and the the work will be boring and pedantic. But you build upon it. Or you say "fuck it" and join the Peace Corps like I ultimately did. -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
