Ah, summer internships: long hours, crappy pay, menial labor, and your boss is probably a raging dick of a middle manager on a power trip. Then there’s this internship. It’s still crappy pay, but we don’t like staying in the office late (especially not when it’s nice out), the work is occasionally fun and interesting, and your bosses are the coolest people this side of an eskimo. Really, it’s a scientific fact.
As a proud (and occasionally mildly embarrassed) Official Stunt & Gimmick’s summer intern, you will go through an alternately thrilling and terrifying ordeal that will make you the most employable Starbucks barista of anyone you know. Just kidding.
So what will you actually be doing? LEARNING! That’s what internships should be about, right? This isn’t one of those BS marketing internships where you sit down, get a desk, and spend all summer entering data from one spreadsheet to another, or doing bullshit work as an extra pair of occasionally free hands. Fuck that. We have a curriculum for you!
At the end of your time with us, you will be able to ramble on aimlessly for hours about:
- Copywriting
- The creative process
- Search, content, and the future of online lead generation
- Research as Zen
- Analytics and the creative misapplication of statistics and game theory
- The strange and wonderful history of the Chilean Sea-Bass, nee Patagonian Tooth-fish
A lot of your time will be spent thinking. Sometimes about things we ask you to think about, other times about just anything. Young people don’t spend nearly enough time thinking these days. That’s the problem with young people. That, and their hula hoops.
You will also spend large chunks of time writing. If it’s good, maybe it will even make it to a client’s desk. If it’s REALLY good, you might see it live on teh intertubes. Occasionally, we’ll make you do really boring research and you’ll hate us for it, but you’ll thank us one day.
The ideal candidate will:
1) Be literate AND like to read. Mention your favorite book in your cover letter for bonus points. If it’s anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald, be prepared to be yelled at.
2) A college degree (completed or in progress) in a writing-related discipline is great, but not required. If you have a degree in something non-writing, tell us why it shouldn’t deter us from hiring you. If you don’t have a degree, tell us why you didn’t think it was a good idea. There are no right answers here.
3) Be creative. Don’t tell us about how creative you are and how all your friends call you a creative type. We don’t care. Show us your creativity – preferably not through a portfolio. Portfolios are ignored 90% of the time because we have better things to do than read your Drama Club playwriting debut.
4) Knowledge of the internet is required. Know how it works, know how it ticks, know where the buttons and levers are. You don’t have to have any idea about what HTML is, but you DO need to know the latest meme on YouTube.
5) Good writing is non-negotiable. Period. End of discussion.
6) You have to know how to operate a computer. This seems self-explanatory, but it’s shocking how many people have no idea what Excel is. Don’t be one of those people. If we have to teach you how to use MS Office and Google Docs, you may as well not apply.