Memoirs of an Intern Reject

Well, technically I was rejected 1.5 times. But I’ll get to that later.

I like to think I’m a successful Product Designer at Viget now. In fact, I’m a senior designer. I even mentor college students, and I’ve been an intern advisor more than once. But for a long time I’ve held onto a great, terrible secret.

I had applied for the UX design internship, back when product design was still more for physical products. I’m pretty sure I made it to the design challenge round, then was eliminated.

At the time, Viget was my dream company. Offering my dream internship. I had followed their articles for years. I was crushed by the rejection, to say the least. And my young adult ego was fragile. I really questioned if design was for me, if I should listen to my parents and high-tail it back to something related to math. But thankfully, I did end up going into the design field.

Fast forward a job or two later—I applied to Viget again, this time as a Product Designer with new tools and skills at my disposal. And when I interviewed at the company, guess what? Nobody brought up that I had applied before.

It turns out, nobody remembered.

So I held onto that secret for years. I felt like no one could know. If nobody knew, then who’s to say it ever happened? I’ve always been a perfect candidate, what do you mean rejected? Me? Haha, good one…

But recently, I finally told my coworkers about my dark past. People were shocked. I received a lot of “WHAT?” and “Really, you?” reactions. There was surprise. Delight. Commiseration. Typing on laptops to find my name in the application system. Incredibly heartening, for sure.

As many college students are now in the place where I was, at the crossroads of internships and school and potential careers, I offer my story as a little bit of hope: rejection isn’t everything.

But aside from hope, I can also offer you students some real advice.

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Junior Me

Some of the advice is product-design specific, but I like to think most of it will be helpful to the masses.

1. Know thyself

It should be no surprise that you need to know your strengths and weaknesses when applying to anything. After all, if you’re going for an internship, the hope is that you will gain new skills to fill in your gaps. But for product designers, I’m here to offer you more specific advice, in the form of a question: do you lean more toward UX or UI?

Let me explain.

Typically, I see young designers fall into these two camps: UX or UI. Designers who lean towards UX have more practice in using the design process, strategy, setting up problem statements, testing theories, and debating solutions. However, they may not have actually worked in high fidelity or implementation much. Or they may have been impaired by mandatory, lackluster style guides or strict dev constraints for their final products, limiting creativity in their UI. Designers who lean towards UI might not have had a fancy design-thinking based education, but they understand web trends, design systems and have an aesthetic eye. In exchange, they may spend less time trying to think of the most suitable solutions for problems, and may skip straight to wireframing or even high-fidelity when pressed, without as much thought as to why they made certain choices. In terms of the design process, UX-leaners are more comfortable in the Empathize and Define stages, while UI-leaners find their footing in the Prototype-High Fidelity stage.

Now these are just generalizations, and it’s likely that you are a blend between the two. However, you probably have a stronger portfolio for one, and it helps to be clear on which it is. And eventually, as a full-fledged designer, you’ll want to have a balance of UX and UI. You need both to reach the arrow. But first, it’s important to understand where you lean so you can a) start to work on your missing skills now and b) bring up those missing skills as a potential area of growth you can pitch to your internship advisor. You don’t need to master everything right now, but it’s helpful to know what you want to work on. Self-awareness is an important part of self-improvement.

2. Understand what you want from your internship, and your career

Take time to list out what you want from an internship, what you won’t accept, and what kind of career you want in the future. And don’t just apply for every internship you see. Resist the urge! It’s especially tempting when you just need something, anything to jump-start your career. But being specific about what you want out of an opportunity and seeing how that aligns with what the company offers will allow you to have more talking points with interviewers. You’ll leave a better impression if you can highlight how the program can help you fill in specific gaps in your skillset or how it matches up with your career interests. Thinking about working at an agency someday? We’re an agency. Let’s talk about that.

It’s okay to be flexible with your wishlist, as long as you have one. It helps internship mentors know that the internship will be valuable to you–which can sometimes be a deciding factor, depending on the company.

3. Know thine target

Definitely look up the basics about what the company makes, the tools they use, what they say on their site, who the big people are. But also do some investigating on LinkedIn. Can you find previous interns? Have employees and mentors at the company posted things you can latch on to? Are they hosting any events you can attend? There’s more beyond just the website, and wayyyy more than what I had when I was a college junior. Take advantage! But also be nice about it.

(Are you reading this article as part of your online sleuthing? I would also recommend Aubrey’s recent article about how to prep for our internship application or this article from one of our previous interns.)

4. Ask for clarification, ask for feedback

This is something I definitely didn’t do, but I wish I had. If you’re able to establish a point of contact, great! Don’t be afraid to ask them stuff. Confused? Ask for clarification. Have extenuating circumstances? Ask if there’s flexibility. Rejected from the program? Ask for feedback as to why. 

Definitely read through any materials you get more than once to avoid having your contact parrot information you already have, but just know that the worst you can get is probably just a non-answer. It took me a long time to learn that a negative response to your question isn’t going to hurt you. Worst case, you get nothing. Best case, you get precious knowledge to help you move forward.

One more thing–and this is important–if asking basic questions does hurt you, you probably don’t want to work there.

5. Understand that failure is a stepping stone… a sharp one

Again, I cannot reiterate this enough: there is hope after rejection! Looking back, I understand why I didn’t make the cut–I had a lot to learn, I fell more into the UX camp and lacked visual polish in my work. I’m still failing in other ways as an adult. The important thing here is try to distill what you can improve on for next time, and work on it.

But also, buy yourself a cookie and weep if you must. While we can use failure as a building block for success, it doesn’t negate the fact that rejection sucks.

6. Check. Your. Spam.

Really, clean out your entire inbox. And here’s where I reveal the second of my many secrets: I consider myself rejected 1.5 times because the second time I applied, the next-steps email got sucked into an email black hole and I wasn’t able to reply.

So I beg you, if you haven’t already. Have a separate email for your professional stuff, send the coupons and cafe rewards somewhere else. Use your name in your email address, try to make it not-spam looking. And going back to item 3, if you haven’t heard from something in a while, don’t be afraid to follow up. Bonus points: if you’re applying using a student email account, you may also want to somehow send records to your personal email for when you leave the school and they deactivate your email. Sigh.

And that’s it. Keep trying, don’t let failure get you down for too long. And someday, maybe everyone at the annual company holiday dinner will shout “No way!” at your story of rejections past.