Berklee Blogs checks in with Camilo Puche, a Music Business major and fall intern, midway through his internship with Conductor’s Cooperative Management, a management company providing worldwide representation and management for classical music conductors. In today’s blog, Camilo discusses overcoming the uncertainty that can accompany a new intern…

Young professionals always feel overwhelmed the first few days in a job. We are unsure whether what we learned in school will translate easily to the tasks that we have to perform in the workplace and many times we sit there wondering what we do next. An internship is a great opportunity to face this initial fear of being out of school and slowly and progressively find ways to apply the knowledge that we acquired in the past few years.

There are many times when we sit in a class wondering: How am I ever going to apply this to my job?  The truth is that every class serves its purpose; we just have to look for it. We may not ever use what we learned in a History of Western Music class in our jobs, but it is a great guide to understanding how we got to be where we are now. We may not be interested in working at the financial department of a record label, but the finance and statistics class teach us how to be resourceful and find a way to overcome a difficulty to accomplish our purpose.

If you are ever sitting in a class wondering what you are doing there and telling yourself that you will never use that stuff in the future, remember that in any job you will always have to do things that you don’t enjoy, it is a part of any job. School gave me a very wide scope of what the music business is, but as my internship has advanced I have realized that I still have many details to learn, many areas to explore. I have realized that just when I thought my learning process was over, it is only just beginning.

The most valuable lesson that I take out of school is that I have to learn how to solve problems on my own, how to investigate and find answers that sometimes nobody is willing to give me. An internship is a great way to get past that initial feeling of loneliness and uncertainty that many of us feel when starting at a new job. The only thing we can do when that happens is take a step back, relax and understand that this is a new stage in our lives and the learning process is just beginning.

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