APPLYING FOR INTERNSHIPS
After some critical reflection on my own creative practice, I decided that I needed to gain some hands-on industry experience before graduating. After applying for DPS, I began the daunting task of figuring out what I actually wanted to do with my life, or at least my year. I chose graphic design as my degree as it felt like the perfect avenue to explore all my interests in design, photography, print, typography, fashion, and communications without having to sacrifice my desire to explore a thousand avenues of design. The versatility of the course appealed to me as an indecisive creative who fears niching down.
This desire to explore new avenues of creativity naturally translated to my goals for DPS, which made finding the perfect job feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Do I really want to do everything? Or am I just too scared to make a decision about what it is I genuinely want to pursue, just in case I end up being wrong?
This decision paralysis has been something I’ve always struggled with. I just couldn’t escape the fear of not getting things right the first time; I guess the curse of perfectionism is really the curse of never committing and never experiencing.
So, with a pit in my stomach and shakey hands, I began to apply for jobs in fashion because the one thing I could say with absolute certainty was that the fashion industry was where I wanted to be. I decided to treat this year as a social experiment – a form of exposure therapy, thinking about my most delusional goals and dreams, ones I thought wouldn’t be possible, and then I applied for them anyway. Pretty quickly, I learnt that embarrassment was a part of the journey and a hurdle I had to overcome if I ever wanted a chance to succeed.
After about a month of emails and online applications, I found my dream internship – an imaging intern in a high fashion modelling agency that would enable me to step into the world of fashion and, best of all, get paid to do so!
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