Chasing a PlayStation Internship: How Tyler Westhause Leveled Up — Part 1
Hearing from a Sony Interactive Entertainment recruiter is a thrill, a dream, and a source of great anxiety. This mix of exciting news and daunting responsibility dominated my mind for months. I doubted myself at every step of the interview process. It distracted me from work. I would try to watch my favorite shows — Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Clone Wars , Breaking Bad, NBA Basketball Games, Anderson Cooper 360, Star Wars (read more on Star Wars.com), The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, etc etc. I wasn’t able to focus, at all. This distraction led to anxiety and issues in my relationship and personal life, it was incredibly stressful.
But looking back, it wasn’t the internship that made me nervous…it was my own feelings about myself. It’s hard, when dealing with bipolar depression, to feel you deserve much of anything. It’s next to impossible, really, at least for me. I’ve had a tendency to fail upwards in my career. Not necessarily because I’m poor at what I do, but because I’ve hustled in ways and walked into rooms that frankly, I was invited into. This was the case with my first internship with PlayStation. I guess in some ways I’m writing this to babble, but I hope it serves as some value to folks who aspire for an internship with any company, big or small, who might feel they don’t have a shot. You do. I did — somehow.
I applied for the Partner Marketing Internship with PlayStation’s Global Third Party Relations department in late October/November of 2017. I had finally begun attending Illinois State University that August in an effort to receive my Bachelor’s Degree. Outside of freelance marketing and new media consulting, I didn’t have much work experience. I had been lucky enough to write a dozen or so articles for local Chicago area newspapers, magazine, and other outlets. On top of that, I’d written a handful of features for Lucasfilm’s StarWars.com and some other geek/gaming news sites. All of that is long in the past and not wildly relevant. The core idea is that my experience was not built for marketing in any way. I’d gotten lucky, searched for e-mails, made a decent pitch, and got picked up by folks kind enough to reply to e-mails. Maybe in some way I was marketing myself, but if anything, I over-promised and under-delivered, at least back then.
I applied for the internship after a buddy sent it my way and raved about the department. In spite of everything I’d done professionally up to that point, working in the games industry was my true dream. As a kid, I became infatuated not only by games themselves but by the industry as a whole. Podcasts like IGN’s Three Red Lights, 1UP FM, GFW Radio, and the Giant Bombcast gave me insight into how games were made as opposed to how games were played. I loved the idea of gaming, but I never knew where I would fit in. I wasn’t a designer. I couldn’t code. I tried to write, but I knew, and know, I still have a long way to go in that department. Marketing was the closest thing I’d done in any of my work, so I took and applied.
When I heard back for the first time, I could hardly believe it. I thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t. But I felt like one, and the greatest challenge throughout that entire process was convincing myself I wasn’t.
I’ll talk about how I did that in Part II…
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Tyler Westhause — Medium: https://medium.com/@tylerwesthause
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