I’m not going to lie to you: interning at Flashstarts is not what I wanted to be doing this summer.
What I really, viscerally wanted was to be at my home away from home, teaching crafts and playing beach volleyball with kids and their parents at family camp in Santa Barbara. I’d worked there two years running and it was hard to envision a summer anywhere else. And even once I acknowledged that it was time for a more career-minded summer, Cleveland and Flashstarts weren’t even on my radar. Having headed straight from southern California to the northeast for school and participating in argument after argument about which coast was better (west coast best coast), it was hard to see anywhere that doesn’t touch the ocean as real.
Cleveland? Really?
Going to school a two-hour train ride from New York means I’ve also been ingrained with the mindset that NYC is the center of the (US) universe when it comes to graphic design (with San Francisco and Los Angeles as distant runners-up). This summer reminded me that all companies need graphic designers and that not all companies are located on what Clevelanders unaffectionately call “the coasts.”
I applied to Flashstarts because I knew I’d have a better chance of getting an internship through Yale’s job listings than with my other strategy of sending cold call-esque emails to every medium-sized design studio and ad firm in New York. I took the job because, as it happens, companies like those were in no position to help me with housing in a new city, let alone pay me for my work. Flashstarts did both. The pull of NYC was strong, but not that strong.
I whined about Cleveland at first, cited desperation when asked why on earth I’d choose to be there. But I’ve always been the person who puts her whole self into being wherever she is and doing whatever she’s doing. Now I’ve been nominated “most likely to come back to Cleveland” because I’m constantly gushing about places like Brewnuts, Tremont’s new beer-based doughnut shop, and Nano Brew, a brewery in Ohio City with giant Jenga and Connect 4 and fan-flipping-tastic graphic design. Cleveland is on the rise, as we out-of-towners have started to say (first jokingly, and now with a little more enthusiasm).
Coming around to entrepreneurship
Before the job began, I tried to reframe my thinking about what kind of design experience it would be. I didn’t care for entrepreneurship and was worried I wouldn’t grow as a designer without mentorship from practicing designers, but working with 12 different startups would at the very least be a great portfolio booster and a way to learn by doing. I ended up lucking out and getting to collaborate on user interface design with one company’s full-time visual designer, which was the perfect way to learn a type of design I’d never tried.
I also learned more about entrepreneurship than I bargained for. As a liberal arts type, I’d always been skeptical of “business” because it seemed impersonal and solely focused on the bottom line, but hearing from user experience designers and meeting the people behind these startups has helped me understand that some corporations are really trying to make things better for people. And if I ever want to start my own design studio or magazine, I have so much more insight than I ever expected because of my time at Flashstarts.
My background is in publications, and that’s always where I thought I’d end up. Flashstarts gave me my first taste of designing for the screen. In addition to the logos and print materials I knew I’d have my hands in, I’ve learned to make high fidelity mockups of mobile apps and have been able to work closely with developers to learn what I can do on my end to make their jobs easier. I’m even working right now on an 8-bit character to be featured in an HTML-5 game. Now, I have a much more versatile skill set, which is essential for a designer seeking employment in an over-saturated market.
Enjoying beanbag time with my new friend, Ibs “Full Power” Saeed
New Possibilities
I fell in love with graphic design while spending hours on end redesigning my high school newspaper and had some of my best college nights working as a production and design editor of the Yale Daily News, staying up all night to bring our special issues to life, hunkering down during Hurricane Sandy because neither snow nor rain would keep our paper from coming out. I thought I’d never find that thrill anywhere but the fast-paced world of daily publications, but this summer proved me wrong. A group of five interns — two developers and three designers — got together one Friday night this summer for the first ever Flashstarts hackathon to create an app of our own. We rolled all the whiteboards into a circle in the middle of the office and soon they were covered with snippets of code, lists of desired features, UI sketches, taglines and logo possibilities. The interns became the entrepreneurs that night, and I discovered that the feeling of late-night exhilaration I so love could be found in more places than I’d imagined. It turned out beautifully, too.
I still miss my kids and working on a Santa Barbara beach, but this was the best transition from camp to the real world I could have asked for. If you find yourself reading this blog skeptically like I did six months ago, I urge you not to count Cleveland or Flashstarts out. Even if it’s not what you want, I guarantee you’ll find something you didn’t expect to find.
Position: Graphic Designer
School: Yale University, Class of 2015
