How did we ever miss hiring THIS guy?

[Rob Grauert]

I wonder what makes people think they are going to be taken seriously after writing a letter or email like that.

He’s annoyed because his initial email was not responded to within a day? A DAY?! Does this kid think the world revolves around him? These days you’re lucky if you even get a response.

And then he goes on to imply that an internship is a waste of time if he doesn’t get hired full-time. Sure, an internship can be a waste of time, but it’s in the hands of the intern.

I love people like this. It just makes me think that it will be a little easier for me to find more work.

Rob Grauert, Jr.
http://www.robgrauert.com
command-r.tumblr.com

[Mark Suszko]

I would have rejected the kid based his initial inquiry, since it had a grammar error. If you can’t be bothered to get it letter-perfect on applications for a job or in your cover letter and resume, that tells me you’re only going to be worse after being hired. Am I too harsh about that? I don’t think so.

[Grinner Hester]

Rich kids don’t need to get jobs, they just have to tell their daddy they are looking. That’s the case with this kid. He wanted no job… just wanted to fire off a couple of emails so he didn’t have to lie to daddy.

[Mark Suszko]

That kid has “management” written all over him:-)

(I didn’t say it would be GOOD management)

If you have an intern, and they are doing a good job, have you told them today? Buy them a lunch or something, in honor of this guy from the article.

[Ron Lindeboom]

You know, I get slammed all the time by people writing me who go ape**** because we do not let every single post go up. They think that what they have to say is so important that how dare we refuse to allow them to post to our boards!?#@!?

Then I go to sites such as Mark pointed to in his post here, and I am convinced that sites that run on auto-pilot are about 1/10th as useful as they could be. I tried to follow the responses and see what people there thought of this issue, but between all the profanity and idiocy, I found the site far less useful than it could have been.

Just my opinion, and not in any way meant as a put-down on Mark Suszko, a man whom I have the deepest respect for.

Ron Lindeboom

[Mark Suszko]

None taken, Ron.

I only wanted you guys to know about the actual article, maybe I should have just copy/pasted that instead.
As far as the article and not the comments, I thought it was a startling kind of thing to see, hopefully an aberration… and I thought it could spark some useful discussion here about the hiring/ vetting process and the expectations we have of interns.

For example, this kid was of the opinion that an internship without a guarantee of a paid full-time at the end of it was a waste. He could not have been more wrong if he tried, and I pity him and the hair net and plastic name badge he is no doubt wearing by now.

As far as control of comments on forums, I find your iron hand in this matter rather a refreshing change of pace from other sites, but it requires a lot of maintenance and discretion. More than most web forums care to spend.

[Rob Grauert]

I totally get the grammar issue. If someone can’t write properly when they are trying to look their best, then how are they going to perform on the job. I must say though, I don’t think grammar should keep someone from being hired for an intern position. I read blogs of very talented editors who write with some poor grammar – worse than mine, and I went to summer school in 11th grade. But despite their poor grammar, they truly are very talented editors.

So I think grammar is a good filter if you’re hiring someone for a legit full-time position, but not necessarily an internship position. They’re interns, and we’re visual people.

But that’s all really just my opinion.

Rob Grauert, Jr.
http://www.robgrauert.com
command-r.tumblr.com

[Jason Jenkins]

[Mark Suszko] “As far as control of comments on forums, I find your iron hand in this matter rather a refreshing change of pace from other sites, but it requires a lot of maintenance and discretion. More than most web forums care to spend.”

Absolutely! One more good reason I like to hang out here ––it’s clean.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

[Mark Suszko]

So.. any good intern stories, evil or angelic? We had one high school intern we took on a shoot on location, we let him put the lav on the talent while we fussed with lighting and etc. Sound was fine, mic placement was good, it was hidden under the sweater.

Came time to strike the set and let the talent go, and somewhere I have some umatic footage of the talent yelling in surprise because the kid just yanked off the hidden lav mic… and with it, the large piece of gaffer tape he’d used to mount it, which had somehow grabbed onto the guy’s chest hair thru or past his t-shirt. Something like the chest hair removal scene from “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”.

One time we had two interns at once, and I swear they were the living embodiment of the Highlights Magazine for Children series called “Goofus and Gallant”. Goofus spent nearly every “working” minute playing Tetris on his new phone. Gallant spent his off time, when not working on set or filing tapes or other drudgery, studying German existentialists as well as practicing with our photoshop and Lightwave suites. Went on to a Fullbright scholarship, studied and taught in Japan and Germany, came back to become a Teacher in Chicago. Goofus, I think, is a high school basketball coach now. His team creamed my son’s basketball team two years ago. They played “prison rules”; threw a lot of elbows, that sort of thing. He yelled at his team members like Bobby Knight. Not cool in Seventh grade.

We had one postgrad type come thru on a special internship, their first day they got the full tour and asked when they were going to direct a show. When we told them we don’t usually do that on the first day, and asked “can you file these tapes in the library before we go out on location this afternoon and check out your skills”, they had quit by lunch. Was it something I said?

One of our interns went right into local TV news shooting after his stint with us. Sadly, though he had skills and drive, the station pay was so poor, he quit to make more money at a desk job renting out cars. Another intern went to work for DC Comics around the time they killed Superman. Another became a TV director for a network affiliate in Chicago, and I hear she eventually married a former DJ from WXRT-FM. I hear one got on at The Daily Show in some capacity. I don’t know any more about them; they don’t write back after leaving us. (sniff).

[Mike Cohen]

Internship 1- WCVB-TV in Boston – rare for a college sophomore to get this position. 3 days a week I helped put together the mid-day newscast. I would get the preliminary rundown, work with an editor to cut the VO and VO-SOT stories, find file footage, rip scripts, distribute rundowns and scripts, write Chyron orders and try to only clog one copy machine per day. It was actually a good deal of responsibility for a 19 year old kid. No horror stories. And WCVB would have a big cookout one Friday per month – free food for all after the noon newscast.

Internship 2 – WFSB-TV in Hartford. While I was primarily working the assignment desk, calling the state police barracks to see if anything was new (it never was), I got to spend the afternoons going in the field with reporters. At the time, the roster of reporters included such names as David Ushery, Mika Brzinski, and Gayle King, all of whom went on to national tv jobs. Thanks to them all for being so nice to me. I got to shake hands with Jesse Jackson and Dr Henry Lee and I think Barbara Bush smiled at me, once the secret service guys let me in the room that is.
I would then sit in the control room during the 5, 5:30 and 6pm newscasts, and then wander the station talking to different people, like the paintbox artist and the weather guy, learning about areas that were basically off limits otherwise. I got yelled at a few times because I was not allowed to be within 12″ of a Betacam deck without being in the union. So it was generally a hands-off experience, but I learned a lot by watching and asking questions.

Internship 3 – Cox cable advertising. I would work with another intern 3 days a week cutting local spots, donuts, assembling the U-Matic tape for the commercial insertion system, deliver tapes to the head-end, and go on a few shoots.

Internship 4 – this was supposed to be the “job at the end of the internship” one. They hired their previous intern who has since become one of the top Avid/FCP editors in the northeast – in 1992 he was possibly the only Avid editor in the northeast. First day on the job I was handed gloves, a rag a bottle of Armorall, and a crate full of XLR and BNC cables used in a warehouse video shoot, and covered in rat and bird droppings. “Excellent experience for a young guy like yourself” I was told.

Once that torture was over, I helped with shoots – loading and unloading gear, setup and breakdown of lights and tripods – we did high end work for corporations in the greater Hartford area. One such shoot was for Jose Cuervo – at the end of the shoot I was given a case of Tequila and Margarita mix, and was the most popular guy on campus that weekend. It could be the only time Vin Baker actually talked to me 😉

Alas, at the end of the gig, they gave me a few days of freelance work, but no offer. No worries, I had my job at Cine-Med lined up by the time NAB rolled around and it has been a great career ever since.

We have had just a few interns – the first one lost some tapes from the first shoot she went on, so that was a pretty short internship. More recently our interns have been paid summer workers from around town and have done a pretty good job because they work in my office under close supervision. We try to treat people fairly – give them some responsibility but check their work before it leaves the building.

I am grateful for the internship experiences I had as the supervisors treated me fairly, gave me some responsibility and checked my work. And that has made all the difference.

Mike Cohen