Berklee Students Intern at Some of LA's Hottest Companies

Dozens of Berklee students spent their summer gaining career experience and making invaluable connections with some of LA’s most influential companies.

March 9, 2015

Jessica Ingram-Bee’s days at NBCUniversal are full of the kind of work you’d expect of a Hollywood tastemaker: looking for hot, new music to feature on E! Entertainment programs, negotiating prices with record companies, and contacting agents. But Ingram-Bee is no executive—she’s a Berklee intern.

“I’ve never worked for a company this big, so it’s been really informative—learning about how a large corporation runs, and learning the beginning to end process of putting music in TV,” Ingram-Bee, a music business major who interned in the Los Angeles offices of NBCUniversal last summer, says.

She’s one of dozens of Berklee students who spent their summer gaining career experience and making invaluable connections with some of LA’s most influential companies.

“There are a lot of schools that have internship programs, but there are not necessarily a lot of schools who have resources for those kids to connect with companies, especially companies as large as ours, in other states,” says Rebecca Rienks, music supervisor at E! Entertainment and Ingram-Bee’s manager.

The fact that Berklee is well-connected in LA, and to big studios, is a huge boon to students, she says. Although Berklee’s Office for Experiential Learning (OEL) doesn’t place students directly in internships, it can help them suss out opportunities in Los Angeles and other cities across the U.S.

The internship search mirrors the job search and will give students the skills that will help them search for an actual position after graduation, says Carolyn Tidwell, the director of the OEL. The office recently rolled out an online intake that guides students and recent alumni through the process of looking for an internship.

Watch students talk about their Los Angeles internships:

Some students, however, pull on other connections to help scout and land summer gigs. Sam Meyer, a professional music major, has an older brother who worked at Maker Studios, a multichannel network whose YouTube channels rake in 6.5 billion views a month. Last summer, Meyer interned there, doing things like finding locations for sets, brainstorming ideas with executives, and even shooting and starring in his own video.

Meyer says that his training at Berklee helped him adapt to an ever-changing environment where improvisation, thinking on the spot, and going with the flow are critical. His boss, production coordinator Ryan Pfleiderer, agrees: “I think Berklee really prepares students to actually be in new media fields. The perfect example is Sam. Sam comes in with a lot of different experiences and a different background than traditional production. And I think that actually plays into his success here because he’s eager to learn, he pays really close attention to detail, and he just has a positive attitude.”

The internship has also changed Meyer’s view of what’s possible after graduation. “It’s made me realize that the entertainment industry, and the music industry, is a very big world. There’s a lot of opportunity, and you just have to do it. There are so many different people out there who want to create things and you just have to open your mouth and say, ‘Hey, let’s do something. Let’s make a video. Let’s write a song.’”