If you’ve already landed yourself an internship, congratulations. You should send that additional thank you text message to your Uncle’s brother-in-law’s tenant’s colleague’s father.If you’ve finished your internship already, here’s hoping you have ‘accepted friends request’ notifications from people with real jobs in that agency by now.If you are just hitting puberty but dream about ‘making’ ads because you want to show a picture with Kareena Kapoor to your friends and folks, take my advice.
DO
1. Your research well before you step into that agency. Know what you’re getting into. Spend one less hour on Facebook and an extra hour on google searching for basic ad agency structures.
2. Dress up like it’s business for you. Like you’re there to carpe diem, make it big, be a hero.
3. Be curious, not naive. Don’t walk around pulling the ‘I am not supposed to know things because I don’t get paid for this’ look. Walk around with your ‘Teach me’ eyes.
4. Ask them to ask you questions. You will be thrown into an agency expected to make the most out of it. Most likely, you won’t get a mentor. Scout a mentor for yourself and get them to chart out your path for you.
5. Follow folks from the agency on twitter, follow their blogs if you have to initiate an informed conversation with people in the agency.
6. Check your email, document, powerpoint for typos. And yes, ‘hi cn u email me pls” can ruin our appetite.
7. Experiment. Create. Give ideas. small. big. impossible. daring. simple. crazy. Make things. You are the ‘youth’ we try describing in our creative briefs. You are usually described as people who change the world. Don’t let us down. But hey, no pressure 🙂
8. Work hard. We also like people who sweat it out for advertising.
DON’T
1. Spot a man with a mustache, point at him and ask “Is that Piyush Pandey?”
2. Ask ‘And which office does David Ogilvy sit out of?’. You could, however, use this as a joke during your first lunch with real people in the agency
3. Hang out only with other interns. Find interesting people in the office, chat up and ask the right questions. Most ad agency folks love to talk.
4. Be ‘that’ guy with a smug look and an ‘This is just a way to sit in an air conditioned office, pretending to work as long as I get a letter’ attitude. If you don’t want to be there, quit now. Give the spot to someone else who wants it. You’ll get some fair karma points in the trade as well.
5. Be afraid to leave your ‘geek’ on. We like geeks. We like people who like things. And know things. In fact, if you have one thing you are most passionate about, tell people.
6. Hesitate to stay in touch with your summer mentors. Send them a hello once in a while. You never know when you’ll need some good career advice from them in the future.