Luxe Interiors + Design, Boca Raton, FL
I spent this summer interning at Luxe Interiors + Design, an architecture and design publication under the SANDOW Design Group (SDG). Luxe is both a print and digital magazine with a target audience of individuals seeking upscale home inspiration and looking to connect with designers in their area. The magazine has more than a dozen geographic regions across the United States, allowing it to connect more deeply with the residents of local communities and develop a trusted relationship with its readership.
I served as an editorial intern for the magazine. This position included a variety of responsibilities, which afforded me the opportunity to get an understanding of how every side of the publication works in tandem to produce a single magazine every two months. I was tasked with compiling a selection of newsletters and listicles as well as updating the site’s image gallery. I was also invited to sit in on a few rounds of pitch meetings, where the editorial staff would review the latest stories and images offered by the magazine’s slate of freelance writers. In these meetings, I both observed the process and criteria used to evaluate each pitch and was called upon to give my own feedback. While these were the two departments I worked most closely with, the magazine also set up one-on-one meet and greets where I could speak personally with managers of sales, marketing and social media to learn more about their positions and arms of the company.
Beyond my work directly with Luxe, I was also part of a larger cohort of SDG interns, each with media-based internships that differed from my own. Together, we developed a project that specifically invited the Gen-Z designer audience to engage more deeply with SDG brands. Our solution was a multimedia app, and our cohort did market research, created user mockups and compiled a deck that we presented to SDG senior management at the end of the internship term.
While I am less interested in the architecture and design sphere, this experience reaffirmed my desire to pursue magazine writing and journalism as a whole. Further, in speaking to editors at Luxe, I was able to learn about each of their individual career paths and gained a better sense of the types of graduate programs that I would be interested in. Aside from acquiring additional career prospective, this internship taught me a lot about working remotely in a professional setting, collaboration with peers who have vastly different skill sets and expertise and advocating for my needs as the lowest ranking member of an organization—all of which will undoubtedly serve me in the rest of my time at Williams and future career experiences.
I would like to conclude by sincerely thanking the Estate of Bruce C. Davey 1944 and the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for this summer experience; as without them, I likely would not have been able to dedicate such a large portion of my summer to this internship without their support.