Onward and Upwards - Chelsea - My Intern No Longer

Whenever I keep an intern around longer than a couple of weeks, you can bet that they are doing a great job, and I like them a lot. I have been known to send them packing, and/or give them realistic reviews on their performance, which these days seems so foreign to many young people who tend to think that everyone gets a BLUE ribbon just for showing up. NOT!
    But Chelsea gets all top marks from me. From the very first day she arrived, she made a contribution.
    I always look for something important for my intern to do. Grunt work is not what interns do here at Crystal Agency. To me, that's a perfectly good waste of a brain.
    My very first intern was an amazingly bright young woman named Cara. Loved her. Still do. She went on to work in the public relations department at Frederick Fekkai in New York City.
    When Cara arrived in the summer before her senior year at the University of Arizona we were in desperate need of a website for Set The Pace Publishing Group. I gave her a budget and the job of building one. She did it. This internship was quite a bit different from the filing she was saddled with at a major magazine publisher the summer before.
    One of my other interns, Lauren Tanaka is working in New York right now, and Melinda Tarbell, my former intern in 2006 is now a top fashion stylist. I gave her, her first styling job, and many more after that. Another intern, a Washingtonian like me, worried me for a second, but pulled it out in the end, and now works for BCBG.
    D'Ixara came in from Riverside 2 days a week. With very scattered thoughts and direction from me she designed (Download tca_blog_dixarablog_001.pdf), picked out the online software for, and started the blog you are reading right now.
    And then there was Chelsea. She walked into my office, and a blog in transition. But when I suggested that she take it over as her project during her internship, her face lit up, she mentioned something about how it had been a
topic or assignment in school at FIDM in Los Angeles, and she just went for it.
    Not only is the blog now fabulous, but she has totally organized the way it's done, and gotten the artists on board for making their own contributions.
    I sent her out with her camera to take back stage photos, and her imaginary microphone to get quotes from them while they were working on shoots so she could get to know them. It worked beautifully, and before you knew it, they were all inviting her to assist them.
    She's heading to Manhattan this summer for her 2nd internship with a top New York fashion designer . A few thousand miles away, but not to far that I can't keep a watchful eye out for her. I've already enlisted one of my former interns, and a few of my favorite makeup artists and future film-makers to help her find an apartment.
    Good Luck Chelsea. You will be sorely missed. But I'm only a phone call away, and available 24/7 for you. Thanks for making a difference.

    Sincerely,

    Crystal