More than Getting Coffee: Recording Arts Internship Expectations
Posted on December 15th, 2014 by Jenny FrankelStudents often fear internships. While they serve as great opportunities to learn skills relevant to future careers, internships tend to be associated with busywork, cleaning, and coffee runs. While certainly internships will feature some of these tasks —there’s always a lot more to it, especially in the recording arts fields. A recording arts internship is nearly essential to anyone who wants to pursue a career in any sort of audio production, and knowing this, companies that offer internships make sure a student’s experience is not wasted on fetching lattes. Recording arts internship expectations range from organizational work to postproduction assistance, from artistic design to marketing, and everything in between. It’s important to know what to expect before you apply.
Recording arts internship expectations almost always include some sort of general organization. This could be creating production schedules, labeling and organizing equipment, sorting instruments, or keeping all multimedia materials logically accessible. These may seem like trivial tasks, but an organized studio or office enhances the productivity of everyone involved.
Other expectations are dependent on which of the many recording arts fields in which you choose to intern. If you’re interested in working for a recording studio or other sort of music production company, you’ll likely be dealing with production software. You’ll be editing files, organizing them within the system, and indexing them for easy access during postproduction. A recording studio doesn’t just rely on software, though. Interns are perfect for the manual labor of setting up and taking down the studio for different sessions. Don’t think of it as grunt work, though. Take the opportunity to learn about spacing, acoustics, and all those other things you picked up in class now that they are right there in front of you!
If you decide to go with a more visual route, recording arts internship expectations are slightly different. Music and audio interacting with some sort of visual creation opens a whole other world of important tasks. Setting up multimedia software, editing audio and video files, and mastering the techniques of syncing are all tedious tasks on the surface, but are absolutely essential for maximum artistic effect. Though you may not be at the full level of artistic director for a music video, for example, your small internship role is a necessary cog in the final machine.
Finally, if the technical side of recording arts doesn’t appeal to you as much, some recording arts internships deal exclusively in marketing. In these internships you might be asked to assist with radio campaigns, establish relationships with local or national television stations, work your Internet mastery with social media outreach, or even help out on the ground by scouting for gigs.
In short, there’s a wealth of opportunities within recording arts internships that go far beyond the stereotypical tasks. Make the most of yours!
Learn more about recording arts internships here.
