Thank you to the Creative Gaga team for inviting me to write about internships. This topic feels personal, mostly because much of what I understand about this industry didn’t come from classrooms, but from the seasons I spent as an intern.
A small, slightly amusing detail.
During my last internship in 2023, at BUCK, I started writing something in my free time. A script called The Intern’s Survival Guide. It was meant to be a short, absurd, satirical animated piece. Emphasis on meant.
It never got made (which, in hindsight, already made it a very accurate internship project).
Being asked to write about internships now sent me back to that unfinished script. I hadn’t thought about it in a while. Not because it was particularly good, but because it was accurate in a way I didn’t recognise at the time. I was joking about caffeine dependency, procrastination, imposter syndrome, and fake confidence. Underneath that, I was really circling how confusing, fragile, and quietly formative that phase actually is.
Internships are usually discussed as transactions.
Paid versus unpaid.
Fair versus exploitative.
Worth it versus not.
The most obvious version goes like this: paid internships are good, unpaid ones are bad, end of story. It’s a tempting frame because it feels decisive. You can pick a side, post about it, and move on.
But the longer you sit with it, the more incomplete that framing feels.
Let me be clear about one thing before we go any further, and it shouldn’t be debatable: ALL THE INTERNSHIPS SHOULD BE PAID! Everything else is a longer conversation.
Payment matters. It signals respect, access, and basic viability. But it isn’t the same thing as value or learning. It tells you something about how you’re treated before you enter a studio, and very little about what happens once you’re inside it. That’s usually where things get…educational.
Some internships pay you and still keep you at a distance.
You’re busy, but not included.
You’re given tasks, not context.
Enough responsibility to stay occupied, not enough to understand why decisions get made.
You leave having learned how to execute instructions, not how thinking actually works.
Some internships don’t pay, and that’s a problem in itself. Not everyone can afford to learn for free. Occasionally, what’s offered instead is access. Not just to tasks, but to the way work is shaped. That still doesn’t excuse the lack of pay. And it also doesn’t guarantee a meaningful experience.
Neither guarantees a good internship.
From the employer’s side, internships often start with good intentions and end with vague expectations. “You’ll learn a lot,” without anyone ever defining what learning is supposed to look like. Tasks get assigned without context, feedback is assumed rather than given, and suddenly, the intern is busy but oddly invisible. Paid or not, that kind of internship teaches efficiency before it teaches how to think.
