Jereek asks:
"What was your overall experience like getting your first job?"
Hi Jereek. Nice to comment with you.
Work is slow today, so I'll give you the long answer.
Little bit of background on me:
I'm from suburban Canada. I played competitive tennis my whole life but somewhere deep down inside me I always wanted to make ads for toilet paper. Just kidding, I wanted to write the next great Canadian novel and then sell out in L.A. by age 25, but I did occasionally see an ad on TV that would make me say "I wonder who thought of that."
And so I ventured out into the world (a small, private university in the middle of nowhere) on a tennis scholarship and majored in journalism and marketing. It was fun for a while until I realized I really, truly hated journalism and marketing. So I panicked, spinning out into a void of self-doubt and sadness. Where had the young, carefree creative writer I once knew disappeared to? Had I lost all childhood innocence? And why hadn't the care package my mom sent two weeks ago arrived yet? It was trying times.
But then finally, one day it happened. I got up the courage to walk up and tell my journalism professor I wanted to take a creative writing course and he said, "cool, the creative writing prof is over there. Go say hi." So I did and he gave me a class syllabus and then he mentioned he ran an advertising club and I could do creative writing there, too. Then I graduated and I realized copywriting was my long lost soul mate and that I really truly wanted to write toilet paper ads, like, for real, so he said you should go to portfolio school. So I applied to Miami Ad School and VCU and I chose Miami Ad School. Just kidding, I didn't get into VCU. Might have had something to do with my GMAT scores that I may or may not have studied for but anyways let's move on.
Miami Ad School has a crazy internship program where you can intern all over the world. So I applied and was accepted to intern at Ogilvy Tokyo then JWT Australia and then voila, Droga5 NYC. I'm glazing over a few details here but I have a meeting at 5pm. I should mention, though, I met my AD partner at Miami Ad School and we traveled together and we had matching portfolios and it was beautiful. It also helped us get an internship at Droga because he was a great AD and coded / animated our portfolio like magic so word to the wise, if you find a partner you like, stick together.
We worked our little butts off when we got to Droga, because it's awesome here and we were like, uh, no we aren't leaving. Ever. But I'm Canadian and he's Indian and we both needed visas so we worked twice as hard to ask for work and get noticed. And somehow, it worked. It wasn't easy and there were tears and sweat and exhaustion and way, way too many burritos but in the end, we made it.
Details of getting a Visa as an international student will be addressed in another post. So will interning, because even though it sucks and you're broke for a while it's still a great way to get that foot in that door. Also, free dinner.
k bye for now.