Speaker 1: Hello, hello friends, it's Joelle and welcome back to another video. Those of you all who are new here, I live and work in LA in the entertainment industry and have very much documented my life growing up, going to college, and then later coming to be here in LA. And I wanted to make this video about everything that I have learned about getting a job in the entertainment industry because when I was in high school and college figuring it out, I severely lacked these resources and this information. So we're going back to the roots and just having a very simple video outlining different things that I did to get jobs in entertainment without the connections or even any sense of guidance and just knowing that I wanted to work in entertainment. So to give some background about me, why you might listen to this 25 year old who apparently still lives in a college dorm looking bedroom. I grew up in San Francisco and went to college at Dartmouth College. I made a lot of videos documenting my time there. I studied economics and film and digital arts because I knew that I wanted to produce in the longterm and didn't really know what producing meant, but I wanted to work in film or television or something. And that required both creative skills in the film side, and I loved animated stuff, so I studied animation, and the finance side. So I studied economics with a concentration in finance. The past places I worked include Nickelodeon at Viacom, which I also documented on the vlog, Buzzfeed, a random commercial production company in San Francisco where I was unpaid, now a major talent agency, UTA for those who are familiar. So the way that I'm formatting this video is breaking down the different stages I went through in getting my first job in entertainment. My first real job in the entertainment industry was at Viacom. It was Nickelodeon. I'd applied very randomly. So we're going to walk through the different processes that I would recommend you go through if you think you might want to work in entertainment and are looking for a way to get started. So to bring it to square one, you're probably trying to figure out what exactly it is that you like most and want to do, because I feel like one thing that took me a really long time to realize was just that there's a lot more jobs out there than you would expect, but it takes focus and a lot of self-motivated work to find out what you're best suited for. So as a general starting point, if you think you're interested, it's obviously helpful to identify which pieces of media you're most interested in, and you should ask yourself, what do you consume most? And I'll say that there can often be the attraction naturally to work in the most glamorous avenues of film and television, but not everyone is suited for that. So pay attention to what you're consuming and what you feel well versed in. Another big question you should ask yourself is whether you want to work on the creative side, which can often lend itself to freelance work, or if you want to do more behind the scenes business, even like tech adjacent entertainment, it's very good to delineate, because those often have two very different paths. That's not to say that you can't do both, but it's just good to consider. And along that line, knowing for yourself whether you can handle life as a freelancer or whether you want a salary, benefits, vacation days, and all that good stuff is also good to think about as you're starting to think about the direction of your career. All this is to say, you don't have to know exactly what you want to do. The more you go and explore, the more you'll learn about what's available to you. These are just good questions to keep in mind. And another thing I'll say about working in entertainment is that besides just doing what you find interesting or fun, it's always good to discover why you want to work in that area. Entertainment is an industry of passion. People love what they do. They're willing to do what they're doing for very little pay, to even pay to do what they're doing. So it's good to know why you feel compelled to be in this place. And truly, if there is another life that you see yourself having, another industry that you think you could be happy in, it's more often than not that you'll end up in that other industry. And that's not to freak anyone out. It's just to be realistic that to be in the entertainment industry can take a lot of sacrifice financially, in terms of stability, in terms of clout and prestige. So just know that a lot of the people here would not survive doing anything else. So now you've done a little bit of soul searching, now it's time to apply practically, what are you doing about that? When you have a little bit of direction, you should take time to think about what steps you're taking in your personal life to expose yourself more to those areas or to gain more experience. Especially in college, which I imagine many of you are in, there's a lot of different opportunities to get involved in the arts and entertainment from a very early stage and honestly a lot of resources. Whether it's signing up for film classes or even volunteering to be in other people's student films, whether it's as an actor or as a PA or whatever they need, those types of opportunities are really only available to you in college. So absolutely take advantage of it. Additionally, use your summers very well. We'll talk about getting internships since my first job in entertainment was an internship at a major entertainment company. Before that, it's easy to spend summers or just little breaks helping out people, friends, friends of friends that you know are working on these types of things. Whether it's something really local to where you live or just a group of friends that you can get together to work on something creative. I feel like especially as you're leaving college, people want to see how you're executing on what you say you want to do. To use myself as an example to share what I did when I was in college, I was majoring in film and focusing on production and then in animation. Making a short film was also an option for your final projects. Additionally, in econ and finance, I got to choose the topics of my research papers and I made my research papers entertainment focused. Outside of just classes, I volunteered to work on a lot of friends short films. Even in addition to working on my own, I acted in a lot of other friends short films to get a sense of other aspects and roles in the industry. And I launched my YouTube channel. I started my YouTube channel when I was in high school when I was first interested in entertainment as a means to teach myself how to film and edit. And here we are over 10 years later, I'm still making random videos for the internet that maybe someone cares to watch, but it taught me a lot of good skills about consistency, marketing, working with brands, all that good stuff. So that leads us into our next topic, which is the resume and cover letter. I think people can be really intimidated by resumes, especially in creative fields. People feel the need to get all crazy with them, to have cute designs and colors on it, but really what matters at the end of the day is how you present yourself in the content of that resume. I used the most boring template of a consulting style cover letter since my school did not have that many pre-professional resources in entertainment. I just used what they had for other industries. In college, you don't have that much work experience, so you focus a lot on your leadership, your extracurricular activities, and you just try to make it sound as applicable as possible to the job description you might be interested in. And that being said, you can have different resumes for different job titles you're applying to. I was applying to jobs in multimedia and production. I was applying to jobs in more strategy-based roles in entertainment, and it just helps to kind of curate the language of your resume. Under each item on my resume, I had two to three bullet points explaining what I did in that leadership position or at that little baby internship, and focus on two main things. Showing the value I added, especially if there was something quantitative that I could add, such as a budget I was working with or the number of people I was helping manage on a project or anything like that. People love some quantitative data. Look at Worth It. $1 burger versus $1 million burger. I'm intrigued, you know? So the same applies to resumes. And then the second is using words listed in the job description of whatever you're applying for and sticking them in your resume. If a job wants you to have good scheduling and organizational skills, I'll talk about where I scheduled and organized for a different role. Take advantage of any pre-professional resources your school has or any upperclassmen, whether they're in your industry or not, to proofread your resume. At the very baseline, it has to be well formatted, easy to read, and not have any typos. Besides that, you know, you throw it to the wind and pray. Separate but somewhat related, when it comes to cover letters, I always use the cover letter to focus on why I was passionate about something. As I said, people in entertainment love people who are just genuinely excited and are true fans of the content that they might be working for. So use your cover letter to focus on why you feel like you're good for that role based off of your passions and experience that might not be immediately apparent on your resume. I will caveat, I know a lot of recruiters that don't read a single cover letter. However, when you are starting out and truly have nothing to show for yourself, if you're, you know, a freshman or sophomore in college, do every aspect of the application that is possible to show how much you care about getting in at this company or in this role. Given that we're also in the digital age, I will say when you're updating your resume, curating your cover letter, also have an active and updated LinkedIn page. Curate it the way you would any other social media profile, knowing that that might be the one snapshot someone sees of you. I know that was a lot. It's a lot to build a resume. It takes a lot of time. The next thing I'm going to go through is what actually helped me start seeing distinct results and hearing back from places. And that is the personal website or portfolio. I think because working in media and entertainment is such a visual and personal industry, oftentimes just words on a page don't necessarily convey what you would bring to the table. When I built my website, I used Weebly. There's a lot of different website builders you can use, Squarespace, Wix. I had different pages for all of my interests. So I had film and things that I directed, written, or produced. I had digital media, YouTube videos, whatnot, anything like that. I had animation projects that I had worked on and I had on-screen things that I'd done, whether I was acting, hosting. I know that's a lot and kind of might come off to people as a little messy with too many things going on. But when you're young, people don't expect you to have as much of a focus. So it's nice to showcase everything that you're working on and show how multifaceted and interesting you are. It is truly sharing your story, the arc of how you got to where you are, and how your next job would be the perfect next chapter in your story. So now that we have all these materials, all these different pieces of information, sharing who you are, your interests, what you might be able to bring to a company, it can be really hard to find where to apply in entertainment. I don't know about you, but at my school, there was no recruitment for entertainment jobs. It was all tech, finance, and consulting. So I was really, really independent with how I found places to apply and it's not as hard or scary as you think. Truly, any major media company probably has a college, internship, or recent grad program. Disney, Viacom, NBC, all of those places have introductory programs for people that they know don't have that much experience, but have a lot of passion and interest. So absolutely, those are great places to apply across the board because they have a lot of different teams and places you can end up to learn more about the different areas within entertainment that are available to you, and they're the perfect places to network. And once you have your foot in the door, you can use every opportunity there to meet someone, make them fall in love with you, connect with them one-on-one, connect with them on LinkedIn, etc. I actually have a video that I made on networking years ago and I'll link that down below because I do think a lot of things that I said back then still apply and really helped me get to where I am. But in addition to applying to all the big places that have their college programs, a really great place to look for places to work is in the credits of movies or any media that you enjoy consuming. Obviously, there are always big names, but especially for people who want to work in production, production companies can be really tiny and boutique, as they say, and it can be helpful just to know what names are out there and if they're working on things that you enjoy. In addition to that, if you don't necessarily have the resources to move to LA or New York or wherever, chances are in wherever you live, there will be local production companies or smaller studios that are also doing media-based work in what you're interested in. Whether it's working at a local news or radio station or a small production company or whatever, it really helps to just google what's going on in your area and just see what pops up. Make a huge master excel sheet of everywhere you're interested in applying, track where you're applying if they have a program, and if they don't have a distinct program for you to apply to, find the info or whatever email resource is on there and send a cold email. I outline cold email writing in this networking video, but very briefly here, it can be a quick three sentences of who you are, what you're interested in doing, asking whether there might be opportunity for you to help out in any capacity at this place. I will say nine times out of ten you won't get a response, but you truly only need that one to be the first opportunity to get you in the door. Once you have your places you've applied, you've sent out this resume and cover letter and website that you've worked so hard on, when you hear back a few things to note are to be extremely timely with your responses. In entertainment, things move fast. Respond to every email in 24 hours. Similarly, if you get a call, respond that day and call back and just make sure that you're actively following up. Sometimes when you send a cold email you don't want to be following up every day because it gets freaking annoying, but wait a week or two and if you don't hear back you can send a follow-up email on that email chain just making sure that they got it because people are so busy the worst they can say is say no, but until you have a no you might as well follow up and see what the situation is because it might have just been that your message to them was missed and overlooked in the incredible volume of things that they're dealing with. When you do get your first interview for an internship or job, obviously do your research on the company, know what projects they've worked on, look up the key figures at that company, who founded it, CEO, c-suite, the leaders of the team that you might be interested in working on and you can use LinkedIn and Google for that and absolutely absolutely you have to send a thank you note after every interview or informational call that you do and like I keep saying with entertainment being such a personality and etiquette based industry things like that really really make a difference. I've been talking for so freaking long about this we're almost at the end of the tunnel. I just have four final notes on working in entertainment that I feel like are important to bring up for anyone who's interested and unfamiliar with this industry. One is the financial aspect. It is no surprise that entertainment does not pay you. I've worked many jobs unpaid which I know is a huge privilege and then after that I made very very little compared to my peers in other industries. Now that I'm an adult I'm just starting to make somewhat livable wages in my full-time job and having full-time salary jobs that are no longer freelance or no longer like fixed term or contract so that is an important thing to consider. If you do not have the financial stability of family or savings or whatever there are a few other places I'd recommend looking. The biggest one I would say is grants from your school. Obviously this presumes that you're at a college with those resources so I know there are a lot of assumptions wrapped up in this note on financials but a lot of schools do have funds and grants for people who are interested in the arts and entertainment but can't necessarily afford to go down that path so absolutely be looking for all the free money in your college and applying for those and being aware of the deadlines so that if you do get a job that you're really excited about but that won't necessarily pay you enough to be able to survive the term you have a little bit of a cushion. That's a little bit of a bleak one but it is just really important to be honest about and I really hope that's something that the entertainment industry changes in the future just being so gatekept by the financial aspect and rewarding people who already come from extremely wealthy families to like keep it within those circles. I think it's just such a loss for the world to not be able to enjoy the creativity and contributions of someone artistically because of their financial background but that's a whole other thing. Next thing I want to call out I mentioned briefly but just to use every opportunity you can to network and meet more people whether you're at a company where you can take informational calls or even at a school event where there's someone visiting that works in an industry you might be remotely interested in just ask them questions about themselves get their contact information if they're open to it and try to ask for a little bit more of their time just so that you can make an impression and so you can learn about what they do. Like I said before I got my first job in entertainment with zero connections it was a cold application to Viacom's summer internship program but after that every job I've gotten has been from some sort of communication prior with someone that I knew with various degrees of separation so really really utilize that first opportunity and let it spiral let it keep growing into a larger network for yourself. The third thing to keep in mind is while you're young in college it's really easy to feel like you have nothing to contribute but that's not true. Entertainment is such a youth-centric industry that your perspective and your taste is additive and any experience you have or awareness of current events education can be applied properly if you get creative with it so please please please don't discount your own experiences this industry will beat you down emotionally enough on your own you don't need to be your own worst enemy. Encourage yourself and actively look for ways that you can be additive to wherever you are and be confident in what you have to contribute. The fourth and final thing is to stay open-minded. This industry if you couldn't already tell changes incredibly rapidly. The jobs that I have didn't exist when I was growing up there was no concept of me aspiring to where I am now because I didn't even know about it and the industries weren't there. Always be absorbing, be a sponge wherever you go, be inquisitive and open to what might pique your interest and where you might be able to contribute and be open-minded to other people that may rub you the wrong way or may not be who you would immediately choose to spend time with but you truly never know where anyone's gonna end up you never know what you can learn from someone and uh it'll be a crazy wild ride but I'm so excited for you for anyone hoping to get into a more creative career and I know this was literally just me rambling for however many minutes but I hope that is additive to you. I just really wish I had someone to lay things out like this when I was younger so I hope this gives a little bit more of a framework of just the practical steps you can take to have a job that you're really excited about and of course as always let me know if you have any comments or questions. Thank you so much for watching, love you, Jesus loves you and I'll see y'all in the next one. Peace.