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If you are privileged enough to have some personal agency in seeking a career path that will pay your bills and provide personal satisfaction, you then must strive to be one of the lucky few who can identify the difference between a vocation and an avocation.
I was always ambitious, like many who are told from a young age that they are capable of doing and being anything they set their minds are. Success is yours to lose!
I’ll never forget what it felt like to drive on the Universal Pictures backlot for my internship interview after taking the Studio Tour countless times growing up as a theme park annual pass holder. (When I turned on my car, “Buck in Here” by DJ Felli Fel was on the radio — oh, to be living your dream in 2007!) By the end of my internship, I’d been offered a job as an assistant to the Executive Vice President of Production — a role practically unheard of for a 20-year-old recent graduate who’d only spent one semester interning in the industry.
All the assistants in the department encouraged me to take the job, but on a lark (and with surprising support from my parents) I had decided to take a gap year to travel and work on my creative writing before spending the next four decades or so sitting in an office.
While traveling abroad, I met someone. If I had taken such a massive gamble on my career, this future I had let myself dream about so deeply, then this must have been the reason why! My plans would all work out: he’d move to the U.S. for me, we’d get married and have kids, and I could still be on track to make a “30 Under 30” list in Variety as a rising studio executive.
When I returned home, the executive who’d offered me a job before I left wasn’t hiring, but he did encourage a former colleague of his to take me on as her assistant at Sony Pictures Animation. It was a great job for me, getting back into the swing of things, even though I’d never imagined I’d work on cartoons. I spent a year and a half on her desk, reading scripts, networking, and learning the ins and outs of project development alongside artists including those from Aardman — a company whose Wallace and Gromit shorts had been among my favorite childhood movies.
But the siren’s song of ~prestige~ cinema called to me. When I had the opportunity to move to an assistant job…
