What It’s Like to Intern at a Design Consultancy
I started my internship at Grand Studio with expectations of learning app and system design, with a little bit of client interaction. By my second day, I figured out that my expectations were slightly different than the reality that was about to hit.
Sure, the first project I was assigned was designing a launch screen for the app of an international sports organization. But I wasn’t just learning — I was actually contributing a huge amount to the actual end product. I was pleasantly surprised by how much Grand Studio and the client both trusted me — and an intern on the client side — to own this project. All I could think was, “I am basically designing the whole thing??? What! I’m an intern!” But there were more surprises to come.
On my third day, I had my first client presentation in a design review. While I thought I’d be learning client interaction and maybe one day presenting a little, I DEFINITELY didn’t expect to do it on the third day of my internship. Thank goodness the other designers on my team helped me a lot along the process.
The thing about gaining real-life experience for a recent college graduate like myself, is that — beyond the fact that it’s extremely hard to get experience at all — it’s hard to compromise your ideas and designs to fit real-life constraints. In this, my expectations were also slightly off, though I didn’t realize it quite yet. In college, I was almost always designing for fictional scenarios that didn’t include any realistic constraints. I could go as wild as I could with my ideas, and execute them into a final product. However, throughout my first few client design reviews here, I found myself constantly thinking “but why that? This is so much better.” As it turns out, I wasn’t alone. After asking questions to my team about how design reviews typically are in the process, I found out that the others on my team had similar thoughts, which made me understand the reality of design consulting.
The design reviews also made me realize how important of a skill communication is, especially in design consulting. Before starting at Grand Studio, I thought I already knew a good amount about how to communicate ideas with a client—to think about all the different possible cases in my designs and then give the best recommendations with an understandable rationale. But now, my goal is to become so great at communicating ideas that maybe someday I won’t have to worry about compromising my designs because my clients will be so convinced that they’ll want to make my ideas happen no matter what constraints exist. I realize that this is very unrealistic. But maybe it’s possible someday — probably in the very far future, but still there.
Starting my first job out of college, I wanted to squeeze as much as I could from the experience, to take advantage as much as I could. So far, Grand Studio has given me a great opportunity to do so. I’ve been exposed to various aspects of the design process of the studio, and gotten to contribute to each of these aspects. The only major disappointment is that I snack so much more because there’s always a lot of free food, and I have no self control. I suppose that could be my next goal as a design consultant!
