It’s twelve and it’s time to leave the building. School will end in three hours, but you’re not coming back for the rest of the day. Instead, you have an interview set up, and you have to miss school for it. You walk the way google maps tells you to, but it takes you under a dark, dripping bridge, and to a dead end looking street, so you veer off the course given to you. Finally, walking up to the door you realize you don’t know how to get it. On the phone the woman tells you to find the studio in the contacts list on the doorbell. Fancy. You get buzzed in, walk up the stairs, turn to the elevator and press the up button. Press number three, wait, get off and press the final button and wait for someone to buzz you into the studio. You don’t know this yet, but this becomes your routine every Wednesday for the rest of the year. You see the woman you talked to on the phone, she is in a conversation and tells you to wait. You sit in one of the chairs in the main lobby, twiddle your thumbs and think about why music is important to you.
The interview goes quicker than expected, and you get the internship. You walk back to the train down the desolate streets and call your dad telling him everything about the adventure with a voice full of excitement. In the weeks to follow you learn all of the intern’s names, if they’re in college, where they grew up, what they want to do, do they like The Avatar? You also learn the audio engineer’s names, and the studio owner’s names. They know yours, too.
“Hey, can you listen to this song that I made and give me feedback?” You ask an intern one day as you walk into the lobby area, shot with sunlight from the evening. He says of course and you go into studio B. You hit play and stand back, flipping your eyes back from the screen to his face watching for his reaction.
“This sounds really good! The only thing I would say to change is make sure you don’t have too many sounds in the same low end frequency range, otherwise it'll sound muddy.” His comments and true reaction made you feel like you were finally using the knowledge you got from hours of sitting in the back of the studio and watching other people at work.
You find out, via two engineers telling you, that “this internship is what you make of it.” You learn what you want to learn by asking questions, and hopefully getting to sit in on sessions. Sometimes there are things to do all day, people to talk to, and things to learn and observe. But sometimes there is absolutely nothing to do. On those days you ask yourself, what can I do to get the most out of being here? Am I wasting space and time?
You are the youngest person there by far. Everyone is of college age or up. You don’t feel like they take you seriously all the time, but you’re okay with that. Sometimes you wish you were doing more. Sometimes you see famous people you don’t know. That’s awkward. Top billboard rappers you’ve never heard of. Rich R&B singers everyone but you knows and worships. What are you doing here if you don't even know who these people are?
In the end you know understand and acknowledge this career changing opportunity. Most people don’t get internships like this until they’re in college. You’ve been handed a key at a young age that people pay money for. In the end you want to get out what you put into the internship, and hope that what you put in is enough.