Gallagher Staging & Productions

Hello! My name is Vivien Do, and I am currently the Marketing Design intern at Gallagher Staging & Productions. This is my very first internship, so when first coming in I really didn't know what to expect. It's been really exciting, because I've always enjoyed going to concerts and performances with my friends, but until now, not once did I ever think about the process it took to get the production there. I have a personality type where I get bored easily and am always craving change, so I love how each day I'm presented with new projects to work on and each day is different from the next.

Gallagher Staging & Productions is a company that specializes in building both rental and custom staging for anything from private corporate events to large-scale music festivals like EDC, Life is Beautiful, and Coachella. Working here, I'm exposed to the entire production process it takes to bring a stage set to life, from the idea itself to the digital renderings to constructing the finished product. A typical day for me involves set cart designing and other miscellaneous projects where I'll do research on the artist, listen to their music, and make designs based on the vibes they give off during the creative process. On other days it's more focused on the social media side where I'll travel on-site to places like VidCon to capture marketing material, create digital flyers, or making additions to the company product catalog.

Although my concentration is in marketing & information systems, and that's what my internship falls under, my real passion lies in operations management. I chose this degree to be able to learn both creative and technical skill sets while still being able to pick up real life leadership experiences along the way, such as my roles as Vice President of Operations and Chapter President in DSP. Even though I know marketing isn't what I want to do in the long term, this internship has opened my eyes to the exhilarating daily life of someone who works in the entertainment business, and has inspired me to pursue a career later on in this industry. And while marketing isn't my end goal, I'm glad that I was able to learn so many different design software programs in the time that I was here that I can later carry on to my future career.

I entered this internship with very basic Adobe Photoshop and Canva knowledge, with my only other experiences on my resume being all customer service jobs. I really owe getting this internship to DSP, both through the mass amount of experiences it gave to to talk about during my interview and the network connection it provided me the to brother that introduced me to this role. I'm now proud to say that I'm not only extremely knowledgeable in Adobe Photoshop, but also InDesign, Illustrator, and Spark. I hope this experience serves as a message to others that it doesn't matter if the internship you apply for doesn't directly correlate to your future career, because at the end of the day every internship is an opportunity to learn something, so go for it!