SAV > SFO: My First “Real” Job
In the fall of 2013, shortly after I graduated from SCAD with a Masters degree in Interactive Design, I had a short phone screen about a three month internship I applied to in San Francisco. The phone call was very casual, and without really delving deeper into the company other than the research I did when applying, I had an offer letter in my inbox that week! It was for a position at AKQA, a huge marketing and advertising agency.
I’d be moving across the country to a place so expensive, the $1 menu at McDonald’s was the $1.50 menu. I didn’t have the money to fly out to hunt for apartments, so my boyfriend and I found a brand new building on Market Street that would accept us leasing an apartment over the Internet. It’s smack between the Twitter headquarters and Uber, no joke. With my intern salary, I could barely afford the apartment, but there was a chance I’d get hired full-time. The plan was to move out a week before my actual start date, in early January 2014, but there was a huge snowstorm that rescheduled our flight, luckily with still a couple days left to buy furniture. We moved with two suitcases of belongings—that’s it.
The AKQA building was a one mile walk away from our apartment—and I loved walking through the city. (It quickly wore off…) Our team of interns were thrust into agency life right away. Our first task was to collect as many business cards from everyone around us, something I admittedly struggled with as an introvert. “Hey, um, I know you’re working right now, but I’m a new intern here…Could you introduce yourself and give me your business card, please?” Yeesh. The office was a huge open-concept floor of a building, with hundreds of employees. It was a bit intimidating. Over time, I started meeting people and getting involved with projects. I worked on a handful of different teams with big names: Target, Visa, Nvidia. I loved the Target team the most, and that’s the brand I chose for my final project: Reinvent the Digital Weekly Ad. (Shameless Portfolio Link)
After completing our final project presentations, we all received job offers, the first time in AKQA history. But I wasn’t too surprised after seeing the company up close and personal—there was actually a lot of turnover, and a lot of unhappy staff. I know better now, but there was one chronically negative “mentor” I worked with that pretty much told me to run from a job offer if I got one, that I’d be stuck like them if I took it. The proposed salary was much lower than anticipated, hardly more than the intern salary. Of course, the other interns tried renegotiating for a higher salary too. I was told if I didn’t take the offer, the money set aside for me could be redistributed to the other interns—giving them the higher salaries they wanted. I didn’t have the foresight to know if I’d be happy if I stayed, and I’d already been looking at job listings in case I didn’t get the job offer, so…I didn’t take the job in favor of helping out the others, and hoped to work for a much smaller company where I could have more of an impact.
