I
applied to over 20 companies and R/GA was one of the few that responded. I got
my first interview acceptance email on the day of the Internship + Career Fair at MICA, which was the first
touchpoint of getting into R/GA. After two phone calls with the recruiter and a phone call with
the Design Director, I was offered to be a Visual Design Intern at R/GA's Los Angeles office.
I had applied to R/GA's Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago offices. When I arrived at the office, the first week made me realize why they chose me for their LA office. My portfolio included many branding samples, and the LA office focuses on branding more than their other eight offices.
The on-boarding process consisted of different workshops and information session about R/GA. I found out that R/GA started as a production company making title screens for Alien and Superman. Then they evolved into a global digital marketing and consultant agency with eighteen offices around the world.
My supervisor was the Creative Director in charge of the Creative Department and managed around seven designers. I worked on over ten client projects and my responsibilities included assisting designers with tasks, creating mood boards, creating visual audits, pinning up the images from the mood board and visual audit file that I created, designing layouts, creating mockups, and making sure slide-decks are visually consistent by tweaking fonts and layouts to a more cohesive form as a whole. I’m certainly most proud working hard and being offered a full-time job when I graduate from MICA.
One of my biggest
take-aways from this program was the field knowledge I gained that you cannot learn in school. I learned a lot more technical skills at R/GA since a college
experience is more based on conceptual thinking and theories. With that said, I’ve learned how
to use the Adobe Creative Cloud programs at a deeper level and I’ve learned how to use a
program called Sketch which I have never used in the past. Working at an agency, especially a big one, made me realize how much I love working on different kinds of projects. I would not enjoy only working on one brand. Being able to work on different client projects would help me become more versatile as a designer and keep the work fresh and exciting. I’m super excited to go back to R/GA when I graduate. Having the company’s name on my resume will certainly open up a lot of opportunities to work at other agencies or big design companies in the future.
