Our summer profiles of inspiring internships continue! Up next is senior Chelsea-Marie Sundiang and her internship at Boutine Inc. Many of you may already be familiar with Chelsea-Marie because she is not only a Communication Studies major but a popular fashion blogger! How popular, you ask? Well, her online project for my Interpersonal Communication course received over FIFTEEN THOUSAND (YES, 15,000!) views in less than a 24 hour period! I am not often left speechless, but I am still speechless over this. Speech. Less. But I digress… here is Chelsea-Marie sharing her internship experience at Boutine:
Fashion blogger extraordinaire Chelsea-Marie
Q: Where did you intern and what do they do?
Chelsea-Marie: “I intern for Boutine Inc. It’s a startup fashion company that allows emerging designers to showcase and sell their clothing online.”
Q: How did you find this internship?
Chelsea-Marie: “As an avid fashion blogger, I stumbled upon a post on fashionista.com with a list of fashion internships and this was the only one in the San Francisco area!”
Q: Why did you decide to intern there?
Chelsea-Marie: “Besides Boutine being a local internship, I really wanted something that would introduce me to the fashion industry and be a stepping stone for me to work my way up/test the waters rather than dive right in to an established fashion company that could easily overwhelm me. I also wanted to be a part of something where I could say I was a contributing factor to the growth of its success and a startup company is where I felt more comfortable and confident doing that.”
Q: What did you do on a regular basis at your internship?
Chelsea-Marie: “My usual routine at Boutine would be coming into the office bright and early in the morning; researching, writing about, and uploading products to the site; contacting and interviewing designers and bloggers via email, skype, and/or in person; going out into the city and taking street-style photos of well dressed people and recommending our website to them; and updating our social media sites.”
Q: What have you learned from this internship?
Chelsea-Marie: “I’ve learned the importance of making your voice be heard. If you really want you, your work, and your talent to be acknowledged, you not only have to do what your boss says, but also go above and beyond that with your own flare. There’s no way you can make a name for yourself in the fashion industry if you’re just simply going by the book. You have to take a lot of risks and constantly be creating ideas and planning how to execute them. Looking back on how unafraid I was to speak my mind and suggest my ideas made me realize how ready I am to take what I know and love about fashion to the next level.”
Q: What advice do you have for other students looking for an internship?
Chelsea-Marie: “You know that cliché, ‘You’ll never know unless you give it a try’? Take advantage of that saying when you’re looking for an internship. If an internship position interests you, by all means go for it and find out if it REALLY is interesting. It’s kind of like dating too, I guess; if it doesn’t work out, then you know what to look for and expect next time around. Also, as important as it is to look the part, you have to BE the part. From the interview, all the way down to doing tasks on the job, if you don’t look or feel like you belong, you don’t. Interning for Boutine, I felt right at home and totally in my zone when it came to the journalist/PR and fashion aspect of the job but it was really obvious how out of place I was every time I had to sit in the office and look at and/or discuss numbers and figures about products. I now know for sure that I can’t be a part of something that limits my creative and artistic ability and I dyed half of my head platinum blonde to express that since most office jobs require a very ‘natural’ and Plain-Jane look.”
Thanks for sharing your advice, Chelsea-Marie! We have a lot of Communication Studies majors who are interested in pursuing a career in fashion, so all of you budding fashionistas out there, listen and learn from Chelsea-Marie!
