It’s the first day of your Industry internship, after two NGO internships and four semesters, after months of stressing and stalking organisation after organisation endlessly on every social media platform known to man, after weeks of troubling our fellow internship coordinators and our beloved seniors, the D-day is here. The day of your first industry internship.
You walk into an office, fully aware of the fact that it is an opportunity that few people have the luxury of having, a blessed trial, a convenient two-month package deal to help you decide what you want to do, essentially, for the rest of your life. Industry internships are a double-edged sword, with the opportunity to garner new experiences also comes the immense pressure to do well, to impress your boss, be the star, win the Oscar for best intern on the planet and of course there is the immense need to get right to the juicy bits of working a media job. You want to work with the best brands, walk into work in a Miranda Priestly-style power suit, be best friends with celebrities and top it all off with a nice letter that says they’d love to have you work with them after you graduate.
But alas, the reality is that before you can have your cake, you have to bake it. And in this case, the recipe involves lots of excel sheets, mediocre copy work and calculating the interaction score for every campaign the organisation has done for a brand in the last six months. Already the cake doesn’t sound all that scrumptious. You start asking yourself some very hard-hitting questions, is going through 800 Facebook comments to pick out poll winners for a daily online competition really all that necessary? How much of an effect will it have on the taste of cake? If you churn out copy so bad that they cease to ask for your assistance, will it really blow the balance of your cake batter enough for the softness of your dream cake to change?
The answer to all these questions is the same, the same way a pastry chef wouldn’t skip a single step of his sophisticated recipe, you too can’t afford to skip the monthly reports and excel sheets. As cumbersome and pointless as they may seem, not adding eggs to your batter because you’re too lazy is just not an option. At the end of the day, it’s your cake and we all know just how picky we are.
Yamini Kinjra
(Batch 2020)
