squeezed like a lemon - Audio Technician Digital Sound Systems Employee Review

This internship gave me the opportunity to get really good hands on experience with setting up, trouble shooting, and packing away equipment for shows from every aspect of live sound production. Your job roles and expectations are not much different from the people who are current employees. You get to assist with an insane variety of shows from small local bands all the way up to mainstream professionals. Most of the people I worked with were super helpful and very passionate about the work they did. They have a million stories to tell about their experiences and are very skilled workers. If you go into the company being hired for one niche (like sound), they do all aspects of productions and you could easily learn a thing or two about the other aspects and get great hands on training in departments such as lightning and video and even banner designs. If you really want to test the waters in this field. This is the place to go. It is very hard to find a paid internship in this field and even though the compensation wasn't much, I do appreciate that I got paid. You also get money for food every day you travel and your hotel costs are paid for. Although I did always have to share a room with somebody. Sometimes (rarely) you get an off day to explore the city you're in.

I didn't experience any of this (that I know of) but there can be a bit of hazing going on. The CEO was extremely friendly and made sure to bring up in our team meetings how he wants the interns treated with respect as well. Just be sure to be helpful and take action when you see someone needing help. People in this field can be very demanding, but (most of the time) it's nothing personal. They will talk like that to everyone because it's show biz and there is not always time to sugar coat things. In my own personal experience the traveling was very hard for me. It's just a part of this industry's territory. I'm very happy I got to experience this field just as a regular worker would, but these hours could be so long. My longest day was 20 hours and I had three 20 hour work days in a row. Its rare, but not unheard of to have a full 24 hour day of work. If you love this industry, than you will probably have a better mindset about it, but personally it was very hard for me. It really is a lifestyle job. Compared to the other interns I was definitely put on the harder projects consistently. I didn't know if that was because they thought I was very capable or because they didn't like me, but either way, I felt a bit overworked and singled out. I did talk with management about it and they offered me a generous 4 days off to compensate, but I only took two because I just needed a sec to breath, not a whole vacation. After that, they did a much better job at leveling out the workload amongst all the interns, even if my concerns may have hurt my intern grade in the end. Speaking of time off, you work regular Mon-Fri 8am-5pm and you "get weekends off" but if there is a show that overlaps into a weekend, you will have to work the weekend and then are expected to go back to work Mon-Fri when you return. The summer is full of shows so if you work in the summer, expect to be working literally every single day until you are told you can have a day off. The trend I saw was you would get one day (rarely two) off the day you came back from a festival that was out of town. In town shows, you typically are expected to come back to work the next day, and no money for food or travel compensation for shows in town.

Opportunities to work large scale events, gain experience within the industry

Quite a toxic work environment. Work life balance (which isn’t great in the industry to begin with) is very poor. Conisistent 60-90 hour work weeks. Pay was extremely low.