Alum
Abby Carmichael
Writer at Young and Laramore
Abby Carmichael, BA'23, writer at Young and Laramore
“I didn’t come into college as part of The Media School. The first major that I declared when I got into college was in American studies. What I found was that I missed the design work that I used to do in high school.
I came into The Media School because I wanted to be more creative and have an outlet for that creativity that wasn’t fine arts based. It was a little serendipitous that I ended up in advertising, and for my first year, I didn’t really care about it that much. And then when I started taking some of the more advanced advertising classes, I started to get really interested in the craft of copywriting and paying more attention to design, typography, and campaign strategy.
Senior year, I did a little bit of work as a teaching assistant for professor Schwab, who was the advertising concentration coordinator. He was piloting a new class that was meant to introduce students to advertising at an earlier point in college.
Schwab will say, and he was probably the first person to tell me that ‘your book (portfolio) is like your brand as a creative.’ It’s a chance to be expressive and interesting and get people’s attention when they very often only have a few seconds to look at your work. I spent my last two years of college working on my book, and I still work on it very often. I just redid it like three weeks ago, and it’s not even because I’m job searching, it’s just because I always want it to be a reflection of my skill, what I’m capable of, who I am, and my voice as a writer.
Post-school, I got a job as a writer for an advertising agency. I landed my full-time job for Young & Laramore in August, but that was after over a year of working as an intern for the same place. My advertising class visited the agency when I was a junior. I connected with one of the writers there and asked her so many questions about her job.
In advertising specifically, the biggest piece of practical advice that I’ve gotten from my bosses is to have good taste across all of creativity. I work as a writer, but it is still very much expected of me that if I’m in a meeting with a team of creatives and they’re trying to decide between two different typography looks or color schemes, I can weigh in on that and say which one I think is better and why.
More generally, I think tenacity is a good lesson. It’s hard and stressful to look for jobs after school. It’s exhausting and, often, a little degrading, but it is always worth reminding yourself to keep at it. Eventually you’ll find something that works for you, and you’ll be excited about it.”
Written By McKenna Cardona
Photos By Michelle Rezsonya