Why Recently Graduated Freelancers Still Need Internships
True freedom, ultimate career balance, and top clients are an internship away.
Graduating from college probably meant freedom from every post-grad prep strategy your alma mater had to offer. Organizations, job fairs, speaking events, oh my!— all persuasive, increasingly pervasive tactics that closed in on every step you took to Economics 101. That corporate creep.
Surrounded were you by the cacophony of overachieving classmates boasting their acceptance to prestigious internships and study abroad programs. “Congrats, Stephanie!,” you would sarcastically scribe in the comments of your graduating class president’s Linkedin post, which would contain hundreds of celebratory remarks that also cheered the news of her new position as “Google software developer.” Didn’t you see her taking shots at the bar the other night?
You were of — yet outside of — your own fellow student body. Your peers pressured you into a 9–5 before you even realized you were a living, breathing professional pariah who just wanted to get ahead without paralleling everyone else’s traditional aspirations.
But look at you now, my fellow “f*** that” freelancer. You got out alive, and with a neat sheet of paper to designate the degree to which other people think you now owe the corporate world. But as a brand new digital nomad, you’ve somehow officially meandered into an alternative realm of self-sufficiency, where life is exclusively what you make it. I can see you now, internally rejoicing behind the screen on which you type your next lines of paint, code, or syntax. All for a cool $200, probably, and a triumphant testimonial. Thanks for your entrepreneurial service.
I know everything seems incredibly dizzying after having ducked and dodged four years' worth of the billionaire's bullet. I’m right there with you as a freelance copywriter who’s half a year removed from the stickiness of my last online exam. I cashed in my freedom via submit button from the parking lot of my local Mcdonalds, laptop atop my Ford Focus's armrest. There had been spotty WiFi at home that day, so I was already unknowingly practicing my location-independent skills when I had decided on Starbucks en route to the next hotspot.
Ever since graduating, though, I’ve felt off-center despite knowing that freelance copywriting is my calling. It’s been a feeling I haven’t quite been able to thumb, even when I’ve examined my Google calendar and inevitably agreed with what I call my “lineup of endeavors.” Weekday blog time-blocks. Client acquisition seven days a week. Saturday and Sunday SEO study sessions. I’ve only reinforced my goals with every reflection of myself I’ve caught in the corner of my screen, as though my shadow’s outlining of my Google calendar has intimated a meant-to-be loyalty to the weekly “lineup” of copywriting projects that stares back at me. Yet, I’ve been remiss in some respect, including unto myself.
On one procrastinating day, I took to the mean streets of Linkedin to see what my fellow graduates were up to. Perhaps, I thought, I could be sucker-punched with inspiration for my answer by any overachieving business major’s profile. Surprise, surprise: an internship showdown across some of the biggest business brawlers I had ever seen finish from my college. As my distaste grew for the straight and arrow, I saved myself from the sorrow and began a more unfiltered contemplation at my desk. Laptop closed.
As I report to you live from my internship-applying lunch break, I can now say that, upon potential acceptance into an intern role at a respectable media agency, I’ll have achieved an enviably unshakeable balance in my life that, without my previous Linkedin quest, would have never been possible. My slight yet potentially life-saving schedule change is thanks not to my observation of the traditional paths my peers have paved, nor their ambition; rather, it’s to noticing the admirable expertise they have carved for themselves prior to graduation.
When I started my freelance journey, I overspent focus on what separates a freelancer’s pursuit of qualification from an employee’s, and not enough on what unites them: expertise. Craft honing. Experience gaining. Reputation building. College professes the incumbency of the internship, but not for reasons of prestige, nor ambition. At their core, internships teach people how to perfect a skill and brand that others are willing to pay money for. Get caught up in the Linkedin hype as I did, and you’ll forever see resume building as, well, just that. It took me until after graduation to realize that all those overachieving business majors weren’t just padding for prospects; they were actually learning to become assets in today’s scarily unstable economic landscape. And now, they are in the restrictive yet secure hands of companies that will leave an invaluable imprint on their reputations as professionals.
Whether you wish to apply your experience to a company or a client, it’s the extra-curricular cultivation of reputation and real-world know-how that will actually earn you the job. Credibility + craft.
Credibility
Let’s face it. If you’re a recently graduated freelancer, you probably have little experience in your respective field. Of course, your degree somewhat compensates for that, including some freelance projects you finessed before graduating. Excellent. But to give up completely on internships, or to think you’re scot-free from ever applying to a formal role again, is like a novice, having watched a few telenovelas, expecting natives to pay him the courtesy of pretending they recognize his jumbled Spanish as fluent.
So if you already have experience, why would you need to seek it in ways other than through freelance clients?
Essentially, quality clients and companies’ perception of your expertise differs from yours; you might be able to cry qualified with your design degree, but they certainly won’t fall for it. Pathetic. They want the true experts, those who have spent years honing their craft or who have worked for other respectable companies. That’s why expertise doesn’t solely hinge on tenure; as long as you have big companies on your resume who have rated your work, you can be 24 and a bonafide master. Expertise is as real as other experts say it is.
So why take the long route — spending years scaling your industry, working exclusively on entrepreneurial projects — when you can expedite that process of validation by associating yourself, through internships, with big names that you couldn’t through freelancing attach your personal brand to? Learning from, connecting, and associating with employees at a Fortune 500 company is increasingly invaluable, and appears more trustworthy than improving some random bakery’s ROI by 2%.
But you’re a freelancer now. You’ll never need a job, let alone a great one. As long as you have clients, you’re set, right?
Let’s just say business is abysmal and clients aren’t flowing as they’ve been. Or, you see an opening that you might actually want to close (they’ll even let you work from home!). But guess what. All those overachieving graduates with premiere internships under their belt are gunning for it too. Can your brand new, 40k/year coding business and that app you built freshman year hold a candle to the competition? Probably not. Consequently, you don’t get the job, and you have to settle for something smaller. Then there you are, in your cubicle, wondering why Mary won’t stop coughing, and where the heck you went wrong. This begs the question: if top companies don’t want you fresh out of graduation, why would high-profile clients?
If being an employee is your fallback, or if a future IBM opening intrigues you enough to apply, then it’s best to prepare for your plan B as your aspirational peers prepared for their MB-plan As. Internships: sucky-backup-plan repellents and fast-tracks to credibility. Why wait for your freelance business to develop? Why wait to have an exceptional resume in 7 years when you can have one in 2? Why wait to be confidently qualified for any awesome position that may invite your nomadic self to settle? If you want to strike that enviably steadfast flexibility that flirts with the best of both worlds, get an internship to place ultimately secure career prerogative in each of your hands. Cmon, 20-something-year-old. Keep your options open.
Craft
But how else are internships so crucial to the freelancer’s portfolio?
A formal experience working at a company — not just for one— puts you in the position of apprentice, in which you earn the approval of both your clients and the coworkers who oversee your projects. To your future clients, having an internship on your resume means you’ll be more technically qualified than if you were to present an exclusively freelance portfolio, within which the lackluster quantifiable metrics and two-sentence testimonials from your last client struggle to justify your outlandish prices. Instead of fantastically banking on your first big break with a dream client, gain not only the branding but also the technical knowledge, through internships, to help you establish trust and produce better results for clients — fast.
As a recently graduated freelancer, you’re banging on the walls of the colosseum, frantically proving to bystanders your deservedness to fight in the arena with your industry’s veterans. Where ever will you find a ticket in, if not at the end of a five-year, ferocious freelancing journey? While a freelance project pays dividends for a job well done, an internship proves its worth regardless of performance. Having that association with an agency does wonders for your personal brand, more so than the local bakery you coded for. But what’s so forgiving about internships is that they facilitate you in ways that freelance projects can’t; you don’t have to brave, with no help or guidance, the solitary expectations of expertise from a client’s exigence. Qualifying yourself right now through internships will cultivate your craft, thus ensuring you don’t fail, at least not from incompetence. Internships teach you things that you would have never learned yourself or to prevent mistakes that you would have continued to make. And they act as impressive portfolio placeholders for the larger companies you’ll eventually replace them with. In turn, your meantime is spent making more money for the clients you can pull (which in itself is bait for a big client to bite) and charging more in consequence.
Your pursuit of success is not professional pageantry or an ambition contest; it’s truly your expertise — the combination of your craft and credibility — that develops your cache. Ask yourself: is my resume, including my entirely entrepreneurial, unproven “lineup of endeavors,” currently worth a prestigious job or client? Is my knowledge thus far worth a Google-caliber project? Unless you want to be stuck coding for bakeries for the next five years, you need more formal experience, and you need it now. That you’re an entrepreneur is ambitious and impressive in itself, but self-sufficiency is not synonymous with expertise; self-taught entrepreneurship takes years for a big client or company to trust. But bolster your skills and authority with the helping hands of a company’s internship program, and I guarantee you’ll be taken more seriously — instantly.
if you’re a recent college graduate already freelancing for top companies, congratulations (you probably haven’t made it this far in the article). But, to the vast majority of us trying to make a quick coding buck — or to profit from our designated design deliverables — hang in there, because the clients with street cred, and the pro prices you can charge them, are just a few internships away. And we build.
As for me, well, I’ll stick to my own 2 Cs: creativity, and lots of caffeine.
