Never Sit Still has been running for over six years, although we’ve only recently taken on our first intern. Up until now, we haven’t had the space, the time, or the resources to give justice to an internship program.
Over the years we’ve heard stories from interns that have had poor experiences at creative studios. They haven’t been given the attention or time they needed to grow, or they’ve been used and abused for client work, or they just haven’t been paid. We didn’t want to give students a lacklustre internship so we’ve held off until the timing was right.
With a recent studio move into a much bigger space, and a larger team of 16 staff, our seniors had the appetite to try an internship program. Mentoring mids and juniors is how we develop talent at Never Sit Still, so our leadership team felt the timing was right to bring on an intern with the potential of being able to hire them at the end of the program.
To help us get started, we found an excellent resource by Never Not Creative (NNC) titled ‘How to host a graduate intern’. The guide helped define how to share an intern’s time between shadowing, mentoring, and producing billable work. It also gave guidance on how long the program should run, how many hours should be worked per week, and how much they should be paid. We also signed the NNC pledge to meet the minimum standards for internships, giving graduates the fair opportunity to forge a career in the creative industry.
With many of our team members being UTS alumni, we reached out to the VisCom course co-ordinator, Nicola Hardcastle, who shared the projects with us that had been completed by students for the Motion Design subject.
There was lots of great work, although one student really stood out to us. Isabelle Trudgian demonstrated a solid understanding of design concepts, along with well developed animation skills. We reached out to her, the planets aligned, and she officially became our first intern.
We’re stoked to have Izzie as part of the team, and we’ve produced a short video that provides some further insight into Izzie’s experience.