Today we were visited by someone in the placement office at Valencia. We currently have an intern from Valencia and he was here to check in on his progress and how Valencia can help us more in the future. We welcome people from any local school to come in to see how we run our internships as we’re proud of what we do. Over our 8 year existence we have had interns in just about every area of the company, probably close to 50 interns. People who want to be editors, audio mixers, instructional designers, writers and Flash programmers have all interned here. We have worked very hard over the years to make sure our intern program is fair. Our internships are generally unpaid so it’s important that we provide them with the experience they deserve. That’s the tradeoff. We don’t work our interns 30, 40, 50 hours per week, we don’t just put them at our front desk all day every day, we don’t stick them in a closet every time clients show up. We try to teach the interns what they need to know to get a job in the industry when they leave. As most people I know will attest to, college gets you book ready for your career but it doesn’t always prepare you for the real world. We hope after 3 or 4 months of an internship a couple days per week our interns are ready for the real world, either with us or elsewhere.
