Rachelle Vazquez

After completing my eight-week internship with Minto Studios in Singapore, I came home with a new perspective on the creative industry, the world, and myself. Moving across the world for two months and entering a completely new environment where I didn’t know anyone was something I was excited about, but also extremely anxious about. I had done so much to get to this point. I set up a GoFundMe to help with travel expenses, applied for more scholarships than I can remember, and received generous donations from my church to help make this experience possible. Knowing how many people supported me made the experience feel even more meaningful. When I was sitting at my gate in the airport, I remember feeling excited and grateful, but also worried about the uncertainty ahead. At the same time, I knew I was meant to be there and that I had so many people back home cheering me on.

During my time at Minto Studios, I worked as a Behind-the-Scenes Videographer. Since the company had multiple photoshoots throughout the week, I got to experience a lot of different environments and meet all kinds of people. Some shoots took us to the top of Marina Bay Sands, while others gave me the chance to meet people I never would have expected to meet during an internship—for one, Singapore’s previous prime minister. My job was to capture the small, raw moments that happened throughout each shoot and then turn them into recap videos for Instagram and TikTok. I learned how to look for moments that could tell the story of an entire day, rather than just filming everything that happened. Some of my edits were silly montages of our workdays, while others captured the genuine relationships and energy between our team and our clients.

Towards the end of my internship, I was given the opportunity to work on a personal project. I decided to create a podcast with my boss about my experience as an American in Singapore and what it was like to intern at Minto Studios. I wanted to share what I had learned while also giving future interns a better idea of what working at the company was actually like. We have released five episodes so far, which have received thousands of views across social media, and we are still working on the rest. Being able to take something I was personally interested in and turn it into a real project was one of my favorite parts of the internship.