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Hi, my name is Lottie Hunter.
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I’m a VMA student.
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I graduate in the summer 2024, and I just finished my internship
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at the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
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to find my internship, I went on LinkedIn,
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and I cross-referenced anyone that lives in New York and works in comedy.
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And I messaged every single person that came up
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and I just asked them
if I could have a zoom meeting with them.
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About 10% of people got back to me, and about half of those people
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agreed to the zoom meeting.
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And I just, at the zoom meeting,
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I asked general questions like what some advice you would give.
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How did you get to where you are now?
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And, at the end, I would just kind of plug in the
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and do you know that any internship opportunities or do you know
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anyone I should talk to about internship
opportunities
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and even fewer
people would refer me to another person.
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But eventually, through
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a very long chain of people, about 7 to 8
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cold contacts in total, people I’ve just never met before.
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Eventually,
one of them was able to hand my resume
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over to the person in charge of hiring interns at the Late Show.
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And one day I just got an email saying, we’d like to interview you.
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I still don’t fully know
who put my resume out there,
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but I am greatly, greatly appreciative
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daily life
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as an intern at the Late
Show is pretty crazy.
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We show up there before anyone else.
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I would usually get there around 8 a.m.,
and then you wouldn’t
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get to leave until everyone else in
the office has left.
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So it was very regularly like 13, 14 hour shifts.
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so when we first get there, we are told what department we’re in.
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We could be on talent, we could be on
script, we could be on general production.
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There’s a bunch of different possibilities
and depending what department in your day
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is going to look very different.
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So if you’re on script, you’re going to be
with the script department,
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printing out
scripts, running rundowns around people,
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highlighting things,
stapling papers together.
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it’s a lot of cardio.
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if you’re on a field shoot,
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then you just basically PAs on whatever
they’re filming that day.
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Oh, you can also be on research where you have the research department
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find stories, you can pitch headlines and jokes.
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you can actually pitch headlines
and jokes all day long.
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And a couple of mine actually made it
to the air, which is pretty awesome.
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So my favorite
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part of the internship
was just how hectic it was,
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like you’d never knew
what was going to happen on any given day.
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One day we had, security threat.
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They told us to be careful, don’t walk outside.
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There’s like, someone that just keeps
perusing the perimeter
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of the theater and they’re not sure
what to do or who they are.
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And it turned out it was Neil deGrasse Tyson,
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and he just wanted to stop by to say hi to Stephen Colbert because they’re friends.
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And he actually ended up being on the show that night because
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the person that they were going to have,
interview dropped out last minute.
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And luckily Neil was there.
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There was also another time where someone came into the kitchen
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with just giant bags full
to the brim of pints of Ben and Jerry’s,
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and he was just scooping ice cream,
giving it to all the staff.
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Interns included.
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And I’m just having a conversation
with him who works at Ben and Jerry’s.
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I’m asking for flavors
and whatnot, and I ask him,
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so when did you start working for
Ben and Jerry’s?
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He goes, oh, from day one.
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I said, oh, okay, that’s pretty cool.
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he goes, yeah, no, my name is Jerry.
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So I just
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had a very casual random conversation
with the Jerry from Ben Jerry’s.
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I will never forget that day.
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I would I’ve never been more starstruck.
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some necessary skills
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I would say
is just being able to be like a yes man.
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People are going to ask you to do things all day long.
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And it could be anything from go pick up my dry cleaning, go get my lunch
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or try on these pants to make sure that they fit, because we think
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that you’re the same pant size as Anya Taylor-Joy, because why not?
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and it’s just random stuff all the time.
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And sometimes it’s cool.
Sometimes it’s like, hey, come with us.
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We’re going to go across town and go, you know, film
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something over by the water,
and you want to be the yes man.
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Because if you’re saying no to the stuff that no one else wants to do,
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then they’re not going to offer you
the things that people do want to do.
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It’s just it’s important to stay positive,
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always be happy
no matter what you’re doing.
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Whether you spit shining shoes,
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scraping gum off the tables, you need to have a smile on your face.
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Need to let people know that you are
happy and appreciative just to be
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where you are.
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Something I wish
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I knew before taking the internship
is that even though there are
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some people in the industry
that aren’t as nice and forgiving
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and accommodating to people just breaking into it,
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that the majority of people genuinely
do want to help you.
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Every single day
I had people, my supervisors, people
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that were executives and producers
for the show and writers,
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and they would be asking me like, where do you go to school?
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What do you want to do when you graduate?
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Why are you at this internship?
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And they actually wanted to know, and
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it was really nice because we had exchange emails.
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I still email regularly
with a lot of the staff at the show.
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some of them even send me job opportunities.
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So I’m, you know,
I’m still struggling, but
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I always have a job if I need one.
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And it’s just it’s really nice.
