Training Wheels: From Student to Intern and Beyond

Written by: Jayda Foote, Copywriting Intern (she/her)

COVID-19 threw many things out of order, and the effects are still lingering to this day. I wear my mask on the train, I work from home 3 out of 5 days of the week, I don’t sit too close to strangers. One thing that remained the same, however, is the liminality of the college intern experience: the feeling of floating in between your first “real” job and your academic safety net.

I’ve had my fair share of stressful assignments in my college career, and I’m sure most people have as well. During my freshman year, I took a class about August Wilson, a prolific playwright, and at the end of the semester I presented a month’s worth of research and creative design. It was not exactly what my professor was looking for, but since it was my very first college presentation, she was lenient. After that, I only ever presented over video chat because of the virus. My confidence was boosted behind the screen, and I was able to have a script nearby, if needed. But even then, if I left something important out or didn’t cite something properly—the worst thing that ever happened was a slight drop in my grade.

The working world is not as forgiving. The stakes are higher when you have other people relying on you to consistently perform as expected. The corporate world provides more independence than the academic world does, and with it comes more responsibility. Thankfully, the beauty of internships is that they are like training wheels—slowly, you become more comfortable with the tasks at hand, the role you play, and the impact you make. I’m grateful for my internship at Razorfish Health—designed to help me learn from any mistakes that I may make, to teach me to grow and adapt. I am always informed of what could be done better, why one word makes more sense than another, and what series of actions could cause a positive or negative domino effect to our business. This is my room to grow, to get comfortable with my training wheels, because we’re past the stage of letter grades and standardized tests. In a few months, the training wheels come off and we take on a new layer of independence. 

What I’ve come to realize time and time again this summer is that I’ve grown to appreciate this grace period. These years are my training days, both personally and professionally. I’m a new recruit doing drills and learning the ropes so I can one day function, confidently, on my own.

After college, the rules are different, and life begins to change—all the time. And even though I won’t have a letter grade to show me how I’m doing, I’m more confident now, I better understand what success looks like in a real-world setting, and I know that my time at Razorfish Health has left me feeling more prepared to take those next steps toward independence.

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Are you just graduating college? Are you wanting to make a career change? Or maybe you’re looking for a place to start your career? Check out our open roles to see if we have something that sounds like you. We know you are not your resume, we understand you are not your work, and we respect that you are so much more than a job description. You are you. So come be you and do you with us.