Most internship applications fail before anyone opens the portfolio. Here's why.

Every year, the students who land the internships at the studios worth caring about aren't always the most technically gifted people in their cohort. Some of them are. But a meaningful number aren't, and the ones who missed out frequently had stronger portfolios. That gap between talent and outcome is where the real lesson lives, and understanding it early changes how you approach the whole process.

The application is a design problem. Most students aren't solving it that way.

When a creative director opens their inbox on a Monday morning and finds forty internship applications, they're not sitting down to evaluate portfolios. They're scanning for reasons to keep reading. The subject line, the opening sentence, the way the email is structured, the care or absence of it in how the whole thing has been put together. These things communicate something about the person behind them before a single piece of work has been seen. Most applications fail at this stage, not because the work isn't good enough, but because nothing about the approach signalled that the applicant understood who they were talking to.

Research isn't optional, it's the brief.

The studios worth interning at receive applications from students who want to work somewhere good. What they're looking for is students who want to work there specifically, and who can demonstrate they understand the difference. Knowing the studio's recent projects, understanding their aesthetic sensibility, being able to articulate why your particular way of thinking is relevant to what they're building, this is the work that happens before the portfolio is even opened. 

The students who do it are immediately distinguishable from the ones who didn't bother.

The portfolio is evidence, not the argument.

Strong work is expected at this level. It's the baseline. What the portfolio needs to do, beyond showing that you can design, is reveal something about how you think. The process behind the work, the decisions that were made and why, the problems you found interesting enough to pursue without anyone asking you to. 

A portfolio that shows thinking is more compelling than one that only shows outcomes, because thinking is what a studio is actually hiring when they take on an intern.

How you communicate around the application matters as much as what's in it.

The email is a piece of writing. The follow-up, if you send one, is a piece of writing. The way you respond when someone gets back to you is a signal about how you'll handle yourself in the studio. Every touchpoint in the application process is an opportunity to show that you communicate clearly, that you're considered rather than desperate, that you understand professional register. Students who treat these moments as afterthoughts are making a decision about how they want to be perceived without realising they're making it.

The internship you want is at a studio with a specific point of view. Applying without understanding that point of view is the most common reason strong students don't get the call.

Spend as much time on the application as you spend on the portfolio. Probably more.

Grab yourself a flat white and pull up a seat. The real course is just beginning.

Shot of the good stuff.