My name is Junyi Shan and I am a first-year graphic design MFA student. During the summer of 2017, I was a graphic design intern for Discovery Communications, a mass media company located in Silver Spring, Maryland. I would like to thank MICA’s career development fair, which provided me with the chance to talk with lots of companies face-to-face last semester, and Discovery Communications is one of the companies that I communicated with during the career fair. I cherished the opportunity to interview for such an awesome internship position and prepared a lot before I attended this fair. I showed my portfolio and had an enjoyable conversation with the interviewer from Discovery Communications.
However, the company didn’t send me a response for two months, so I thought I had missed out on the internship, but I was so happy to get the letter of acceptance from Discovery!
My internship began with the delightful orientation which Discovery holds to welcome summer 2017 interns. After the orientation, I met my director, Janet, who is the creative director in Discovery Communications and who is responsible for the overall brand of the company as a whole. She was such a nice supervisor, and I learned a lot from her, both at work and off the job. My role during the internship involved doing some graphic design for the team, and one of my assignments was to design the Discovery Gateway logo. I also designed some advertisement pages, posters, and cover art. I’m so proud of being one of the members of the Discovery family; everyone there was so kind and talented. In addition, when my works appeared in people’s vision and got recognized, I realized that is the value of my job.
“Do not set obstacles for yourself.” I think that is my biggest take-away from the internship experience. If you would like to pursue something, just try, do not be afraid of it! Even when you meet setbacks during the process, like your boss may reject your work, learn to build up a thick skin and improve yourself instead of being discouraged. What’s more, I also acquired the skill of networking, which will greatly increase the chances of getting a satisfying job.
I am so lucky to have had this internship experience before I enter the workforce. It let me know which areas I should improve in and encouraged me to devote more energy to achieve my goals.
