Born and raised just up the coast from Los Angeles, I know all about the City of Angels. To keep it blunt, I hate everything about it. It is dirty, it can take hours to travel a few mere miles and the bright-eyed “I just want to be famous” waiters and valet drivers can be overwhelming. Call me jaded, but L.A. is just not my kind of city.
New York City, on the other hand, is a different story. I love everything about it. Even as a sophomore, I have already mapped out the best areas in each New York niche to one day live in and have recruited friends to make the move out there with me the second I walk over the seal in Dallas Hall. The magic of the bright lights of the city, the concrete jungle–all of it beckons to me.
Of course, these are just my opinions. Despite your view of these coastal hubs, there is a generally accepted belief by most college students that in these cities lies the golden ticket of internship opportunities. While you may be right – they both do have a lot to offer – I am here to tell you why you are wrong.
This summer, I traded my all-access beach club pass and the perfect 75 degree weather of California during these off months for the scorching days and nights of Dallas.
Most people asked why, some questioned if maybe Texas was slipping something funny in my water, but for me my decision was easy: I had landed the internship of my dreams. I spent those three months in the offices of FD Magazine, the luxury living and fashion magazine of The Dallas Morning News.
Between boxing up shoes at 1 A.M. after an eight-hour photo shoot to sunny days spent inside in a cubicle fact checking, it wasn’t all the glitz and glamour that Lauren Conrad promised on The Hills. Despite the less than chic workload, I would consider this internship as an “aha!” moment, a moment when it felt like everything was coming together and I was right where I was supposed to be.
Interning for FD was an incredible experience, but an experience I do not think would have been possible if I was not in Dallas. After a year at SMU and a summer in this city, I have come to the conclusion that Dallas is the best place in the country for fashion industry internships. Don’t believe me? Let me try and convince you.
If you check any of the lists that companies like Forbes or Business Insiders put out ranking things like “Best cities for recent graduates” or “Cities with the greatest economic growth”, I guarantee you Dallas makes an appearance. Dallas’s economic growth in the past few years has been off the charts. Despite the slowly recovering national recession, Dallas is more profitable than ever.
For this reason, among many others, Dallas has some of the top national companies headquartered here and more and more are moving to the Lone Star State each year. Neiman Marcus, one of the top department store chains in the world, is headquartered just a few miles away in our very own downtown area. If a company or fashion house is not headquartered here, they most likely have a store in one of the covetable Highland Park Village spaces or in the revitalized downtown area.
You may not know it, but the majority of these stores offer internships in addition to the companies with offices here. These internships are with some of the most prestigious names in the fashion industry including Chanel and Christian Dior. Dallas’s employer options are increasingly becoming more on par with that of L.A. and New York City as our downtown continues to grow and expand.
So what you ask? Here’s another big difference between those two major metropolises and Dallas: there you are a small fish in a big pond, here you are a big fish in a small pond. With all due respect to University of Texas Dallas and University of North Texas, SMU has the most premiere pool of applicants Dallas has to offer companies. As a Fashion Media major, I received a list of all the companies that approached SMU asking for us students. On this list there were well over 100 very impressive companies and the specific contact information for whom to speak with.
Not only do SMU students face little competition from schools in the Dallas area, but also schools nationwide. Fashion-minded students often assume L.A. and New York City are the only cities for premiere fashion internships, and they flock in the thousands every summer to these cities in hopes of being one of the maybe two or three people that are selected for the coveted spots. Overall, SMU students have all the opportunities Dallas has to offer right at their fingertips for their picking.
The real take away point for me came in the form of my superiors – basically everyone I worked with since I was a lowly intern – and the impression they left on me. Walking into a fashion magazine and hearing “editor-in-chief”, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly character from “The Devil Wears Prada” comes to mind. With this predetermined notion, I was so shocked to find that FD’s editor-in-chief was one of the kindest and most appreciative people in that office.
He never failed to make a point to personally thank me for my hard work, even when it seemed like I was doing menial tasks, and working under him changed the way I view what it means to be in a position in power and how one treats those that work underneath them.
This summer was more than I ever could have imagined. Not only did I get the internship I had been dreaming about since I could open the pages of Vogue, but it also gave me invaluable experiences I couldn’t have come by in a bigger city setting.
In the three short months, I worked with the world-famous Chandra North, traveled to Glenrose, Texas for an overnight, on-location photo shoot (male models included), and was given a private, pre-opening tour of the George Bush Library’s Oscar de la Renta exhibit by First Lady Laura Bush, de la Renta CEO Alex Bolen and the Instagram famous @OscarPRGirl Erika Bearman. I also had my first article published in their August “Hot” issue and even spearheaded the magazine’s social media makeover.
Overall, I believe Dallas was my internship fairy godmother. It offered me a place where I could truly shine in a company that can open so many doors, and offered me an irreplaceable experience. So look no further than our very own Dallas backyard for fashion opportunities of a lifetime because Dallas has more to offer than one may think, and you don’t want to miss out.
