Intern in the city: Six months in, six lessons learned

It’s been kinetic, stretching, illuminating, and perhaps more formative than I was anticipating.

Somewhere across 24 weeks of commutes, calls and curveballs, the experience has become more than a blur of firsts. It’s started to settle into a set of lessons about communication, collaboration, creativity, and the professional world that I’m growing within.

And so I’ve collected below my core learnings – one for every month spent at Living.

One. Speaking well starts with listening well

I have learned that good communication is not just about making yourself understood. It is about understanding the person in front of you: how they work, what they need, what they value, and how they best receive information.

Different team members come from different backgrounds and disciplines, and so different modes of work require different kinds of communication, and learning to adapt without losing clarity has been one of the most important lessons of working in a team.

Two. The best work happens when left brain meets right brain

When I first heard I’d gotten the position at Living, a small part of me winced at the idea of working primarily with financial firms – I needed a math tutor from ages 13 to 16 and vaguely remember throwing up on my mother with stress once over a mundanely sadistic mental arithmetic workbook. A small part of me wondered how well I would operate in a world I assumed was governed by spreadsheets, numbers and hard logic.

To my pleasant surprise, the work I have encountered has been far more hybrid. Creativity is steered by data, brand and site audits are followed by creative strategy, digital diagnostics precede content creation. Data analysis becomes thought leadership, and research becomes narrative.

Perhaps a product of the fact that the two heads of our agency come from the trading floor and design school respectively, the result is an operation that feels whole, holistic, collaborative, and complete.

Three. Specialisation doesn’t mean isolation

It’s easy to assume that when you have a team made up of different specialties and precise skill sets, each individual stays within the lanes of their own work. On the contrary, what I’ve found is that specialization works best when it creates connection, not separation.

The point is not for everyone to know everything, but for each person to understand where their thinking can add value, and how that thinking can join up with someone else’s. It’s about knowing not just where your strengths lie, but where those strengths sit in the wider ecosystem that carries a job forward.

The most efficient projects, I’ve found, are where you tap into each person’s skill set at coordinated stages to take something through the entire arc of development, with each round of collaboration bolstering the clarity and sharpening the quality of the work.

Four. Good work is rarely linear

The process is often much messier than the final output suggests. Ideas change. Findings shift. Feedback reframes things constantly. A direction that feels certain one day can become less convincing the next.

But I’ve learnt that this movement isn’t a failure of the process, it’s a pressure point where something is often broken down before its rebuilt into something with better flow, scale, or sense.

Five. There can be room to play

One merit of working for a smaller agency over a more rigid organization is the flexibility it grants. One thing that has surprised me about working at Living is the freedom I have been given to innovate. To experiment. To take existing ways of working, evaluate them, tweak them and reformulate them into something new, something current or something more useful.

Living keeps one eye on the horizon, and as a result are constantly looking at ways to elevate their game. For me, it’s adapting our Ratings criteria to evolving industry expectations, exploring how artificial intelligence can support our research methodology, or thinking about how we can make our processes sharper, faster and more accurate.

For others, it might mean educating themselves on new platforms, deep-diving into newer or more niche industries, or finding stronger ways to bring ideas to life for clients.

The point is that these reformulations aren’t a break from the usual workflow, but a pivotal factor in sustaining it.

Six. Research is deeply creative

Research in academic fields has an inherent output. Information is gathered, interpreted and reformulated into ideas, arguments or critical theory. At the time, it felt like a playful opportunity to put sharp, unconventional or disruptive ideas into the world.

I don’t think I expected that same formula to carry over so clearly into professional or corporate research. What I’ve learnt is that research is not just listening, but can be something close to a creative endeavor in itself.

Data is collected, read and stored, yes, but then narratives are crafted, stories are built, insights are forged and a path forward is charted. Intentional choices are required to create something insightful, reflective, and persuasive.

At its best, research moves both ways. It brings the outside in, but it also then pushes something back out – we get to use our mouths as much as our ears.  

Here’s to six more.

Jacob Whiteley-Guest, Intern, Living New York