Not each college pupil knows how to turn an interest into a career. Valerie Boucher ’20 admits that she didn’t either — till she took her ardor for movies and introduced some Bentley classes: doing an internship to expand her strengths and combining commercial enterprise with the humanities and sciences. It wasn’t long till a celeb turned into born.
“I’ve continually desired to pursue a career in film and entertainment,” recollects Boucher, majoring in Information Design and Corporate Communication. “I determined that I desired an internship in Los Angeles running in the film to see if that was the path I wanted to go with my degree.”
The idea became some distance-reaching: an internship within the aggressive Hollywood amusement mecca and an enterprise pupil, no less. But Boucher located her big spoil when she scored a risk at an internship at a manufacturing enterprise based on the outstanding actors/filmmakers Bradley Cooper and Todd Phillips.
Once she landed the interview, she relied on the instruction she had learned in Bentley’s professional development advent seminars.
“The mock interview that we did sophomore year confirmed to me that anytime you’re interviewing with someone, that person of route deserves respect; however, they’re additionally just an ordinary person who probably feels awkward asking you a group of formal questions,” Boucher says. “If you deliver yourself with confidence and cause them to feel just like the agreement among you’ll be at the same time useful, you’re a whole lot better off.”
To cross a step further and push back potential degree fright at some stage in the interview, Boucher met with Alyssa Hammond, Bentley’s director of undergraduate profession schooling, and consequences. The education paid off Bouch;er aced the interview.
During Boucher’s internship there, the organization released the field-office hit A Star is Born. The enterprise has additionally released the well-known movies American Sniper and War Dogs. And Boucher’s work revel in became just as superb because of the film being produced.
“My internship became virtually hands-on,” she says. “Every day I went in, I was reading and writing coverage on scripts or sitting in on enterprise meetings in which we discussed a way to take an easy idea and flip it right into a -hour film or successful television series. I never once left paintings feeling like I hadn’t contributed something meaningful.”
After studying, summarizing, and reading a one hundred twenty-page script, Boucher needed to “reset” before diving into the next.
“The second I finished one script and moved directly to some other, I had to allow move of each feeling I had just skilled studying the previous script,” she recollects. “That potential to stop, reset and start up a brand new script with a clear and open thought is crucial. There’s no excuse to, by chance, pass on a great TV or movie assignment because you had been stuck in the negativity of the not-so-outstanding script which you read properly before it.”
Boucher says that Bentley’s rigorous coursework and enterprise background – although uncommon for a Hollywood intern – prepared her well. “I chose Bentley because I desired to no longer handiest create, however additionally can stroll right into a room complete of fits with my tasks and thoughts and not be shut down because I don’t know something about the ‘bottom-line’ facet of factors.”
It gave her the confidence to leap into the film enterprise and interaction with top professionals and executives because a Los Angeles internship at a production company comes with “pinch-me moments,” like bumping into Clint Eastwood on a lunch break, as took place to Boucher.
Boucher says the internship no longer most effectively reaffirmed her selection to work in a movie and improved her desires.
“During my internship, I worked in manufacturing. However, I become lucky that many humans I met worked in all regions of making a film,” she says. “That inspired me, and by the point I left, I wanted to be a screenwriter, manufacturer, and director. You call it, and I need to do it!”