World's Greatest Internship

You should select me because

I believe I am the best candidate for the the World's Greatest Internship program because I have developed skills in prototyping, craft, and creative problem solving over my career as a design student and am extremely eager to share my knowledge and approach with others as well as for them to share their experiences with me. I have an immense love of learning and a strong passion for the ever changing world of design and communication.Over the last four years, I have gained experience through internships in the advertising field, worked alongside industrial designers and mechanical engineers at a product design firm, and most recently interned at a branding studio in Boston before my senior year where I was hired on as Junior Designer for the following semester.Through these experiences, I have gained a broad perspective of how these different facets of the design field operate. But all of these businesses were located in a small portion of New England, which limited the types of people I was able to interact with. If I were selected to be a part of the WGI, I would be able to fulfill my desire to travel around the world and work alongside the designers that are shaping the future of communication.

1. Why are you interested in wgi?

As a recent graduate with a BFA in Communication Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, I am eager to explore all aspects of the design world and be exposed to as many different working environments in order to grow as a collaborative designer. I have had experience working at advertising agencies, industrial design firms, and branding studios in New England. The opportunity to be a part of the World's Greatest Internship would allow me to experience how designers from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds approach creative problem solving.

2. What are you looking to gain from an experience such as WGI?

With all internships, I look to gain an exciting and informative view of how creatives in the field think about design. Instead of only appreciating their work from an outside perspective, an experience such as WGI would allow me to achieve an inside look into how these superstar designers from around the world think and collaborate with one another. As well as being able to work with them first hand to further grow skills as a designer and creative thinker.

3. What would be your goals after completing WGI if you were selected?

My goals after completing the WGI would be to take of the knowledge that I have gained from working alongside so many different types of designers and bring that collaborative spirit into the workforce to better diversify the thinking of the people I work with. From working with mechanical engineers and industrial designers in Connecticut, to brand and experience designers in Boston their mindsets and approach to design vary drastically. When I think about how these approaches may vary to those of designers from the West coast to Australia, I get extremely excited at the thought of being exposed to these different ways of thinking about design and of crafting meaningful experiences.

4. How did you hear about wgi?

I heard about WGI from a friend and fellow student at MassArt who told me about the program. In a similar approach as WGI, every semester at MassArt we have design exchange students from around the world that join the program for a few months in order for them to experience how design is taught in Boston as well as for them to give us incite into how they have been taught where they attend school. These short experiences have been a great source of bonding over our different backgrounds and a mutual exchange of design and cultural principles.

5. Share an example of a time you were most motivated and a time you were most demotivated.

Entering my senior year at MassArt, I was given the opportunity to share a desk in the design studio on campus. In my previous two years in the program, I had opted to work from home. But by working alongside the other students in both illustration and communication design these past two semesters, the amount of comradery that I felt towards my peers drastically increased my creativity and motivation to create. Not only did this impact my own work, but by being around these other students we were able to teach each other different ways to improve our craft and problem solve when one of us was hitting a dead end. This sense of community was something that defined my senior year at MassArt, and the friendships that were formed are ones that will continue to exist as we enter the professional field. A time when I felt the least motivated would probably be over my winter break in December 2018. As we were approaching our last semester, we were tasked with deciding on a topic for our degree projects. The amount of pressure that came along with planning for my degree project put a heavy burden on my ability to stay motivated. With a month to think over my direction of study for my last semester, I was able to use this time to focus on other hobbies to free my mind. I came back to school at the beginning of 2019 with the idea to explore how the heist movies could be used to generate new forms of design, leaving my options completely open for the method and form this exploration would take.

6. In your opinion, what creates a great culture at a company?

I believe a great company culture is created through an open hierarchy of voice. By allowing all team members an equal voice in brainstorming, a stronger group mentality is formed bringing a more diverse set of ideas to every creative solution.

7. What brands and companies do you admire and why?

I really admire the video game developer Valve's dedication to the creatives that are exploring the possibilities of virtual reality and adapting this new technology into the field of education and entertainment. This new wave of virtual and augmented realities being introduced to the mass market will have a great impact on how we communicate as designers in the coming decades. Already we have seen an increase in the value of tactile materials in products such as the fabric wrapped Google's Daydream VR headset and even just the uptick in the popularity of small run print magazines that have become a commodity in the printed world of design. I also truly admire companies such as Everlane, who strive for a sense of radical transparency in the clothing they produce by working with factories that ethically source their materials and treat and pay their workers fairly. This transparency allows the consumer to see exactly where their clothes were made and the care that went into their thinking about the impact that factories have on the communities they are in and the surrounding environment. They also worked with one of my favorite type foundries, Letters From Sweden, in collaboration with Collins in San Francisco to update a custom typeface for their brand.

8. What do you do to stay sharp and improve your craft?

To stay sharp in my work I try and expose myself to as many different design materials as I can get my hands on, from short run type zines to type specimen books from the 1900s to the latest publications from Steidl and Taschen from my school's library. Through consuming these materials, I'm able to broaden my thinking about how people are communicating today through photography, design, and writing as well as how these methods compare to the style of thinking from the great designers of the past century.

9. What’s your favorite quote?

"We are interpreters, not merely translators, between sender and receiver. What we say and how we say it makes a difference. If we want to speak to people, we need to know their language. In order to design for understanding, we need to understand design." — Erik Spiekermann

10. If you could solve one problem in the world what would it be?

Cory Hassmann

I believe a great company culture is created through an open hierarchy of voice. By allowing all team members an equal voice in brainstorming, a stronger group mentality is formed bringing a more diverse set of ideas to every creative solution.

"We are interpreters, not merely translators, between sender and receiver. What we say and how we say it makes a difference. If we want to speak to people, we need to know their language. In order to design for understanding, we need to understand design." — Erik Spiekermann