00:00Hey guys, it's Lucy. I've received a ton of questions on Instagram and YouTube and
00:04Twitter about my career path and how I got to do what I'm doing today for
00:08Refinery29, so I'm hoping to answer all of your questions right now. In order to
00:12tell the story of how I got to where I am, I have to go back in time and take
00:16you back to childhood Lucy. I was never shy in front of the camera. I always loved
00:20performing. In high school I did theater and in college I was in an acapella group
00:25and performing was always a really big part of who I was. The other side of me
00:29was able to stomach really gory open heart surgery on TV. So for a while as a
00:34young child I thought maybe I meant to be a doctor. But when it came time to go to
00:38college and I ended up getting into Johns Hopkins and deciding to go there, I
00:42figured this must be a sign. If I want to be a doctor, Johns Hopkins University is
00:46one of the best medical institutions in the entire world. I had a couple of
00:49conversations with some friends of mine who were also pre-med and it just didn't
00:53seem that we had the same reasons for wanting to be a doctor, which made me
00:57think maybe I made the wrong decision. When I decided to switch my major away
01:01from neuroscience, I needed to figure out what I was gonna actually major in. I've
01:05always loved writing, so when I discovered that the writing seminars
01:08department at Johns Hopkins was one of the strongest writing programs in the
01:12whole country, I knew that that needed to be my new major. A lot of people ask where
01:16I got my production experience and what classes I took to learn these skills. The
01:21truth is I did not take any classes on video production. I learned every single thing
01:26that I know about production from making videos for YouTube. So as a freshman at
01:30Hopkins, I decided to pitch a YouTube series to the admissions office that was
01:34essentially a travel channel show about the city of Baltimore. Now let me just
01:38say I had no production experience when I pitched this show. Truly I was going in
01:43blind, but I had an idea and I thought I could do it and I pitched it and the
01:47admissions office loved it. Once I had been in college for a couple of years and I
01:50had been producing all of this video content, I kept sending it over to the
01:54Today Show because I wanted to show them that if they ever needed a teen to come
01:58onto the show, I was a comfortable teen on camera. Then one day my junior year, I
02:02guess I sent enough videos over that a producer from the Today Show reached out
02:06and invited me to come on the show. They were doing a segment about parents and
02:10teens and they wanted to talk to teens directly. Over the course of a year, I
02:14was on the Today Show six or seven times. Then it came time to graduate from
02:18college and I remember really thinking that I was headed towards a career of
02:21being on camera in a TV environment. But unfortunately the only on-camera
02:26opportunity that I got was a boot camp program to be a news reporter and that
02:30really didn't seem to align with the exact type of on-camera work that I
02:34wanted to do. So instead of taking that, I wound up going the complete opposite route
02:38and going into the production side. I started at a giant ad agency as a PA, a
02:43production assistant, and I worked my way up over the course of a year to being an
02:46AP, an associate producer. The environment at this ad agency really fostered
02:51creativity and being a maker and I remember them telling us to just pick up
02:55a camera and do something. And so I really have this ad agency to thank for
02:59my current stop-motion love. I didn't know anyone else that made stop-motions. I
03:03didn't ever take a class on it. I didn't use any apps to make stop-motions. I
03:07learned it just through doing it and through practicing it and over time I was
03:11able to really perfect the art of the craft. My love for stop-motion ended up
03:16turning into a side hustle and I had brands coming to me asking me to create
03:19stop-motions for their social media channels, for their websites, and at the
03:23time when I was working at that ad agency, the stop-motion videos on my
03:26Instagram were paying for my rent in New York City. So how did I get to Refinery29?
03:31I was at this ad agency and I really still had my on-camera dream. Somebody who
03:36I met at my ad agency actually gave me a connection to the video team at
03:40Refinery29. Now this was in 2015 when the video team at Refinery29 was tiny and was
03:45just getting started and I remember showing them all of my video reels,
03:49everything I did at school, on the Today Show, all of my stop-motion videos, and it
03:53was absolutely right place, right time. So I whipped out my notebook which had a
03:57whole bunch of shows that I had wanted to produce since high school, one of them
04:01being the five-day challenge format, Try Living with Lucy, and thankfully Refinery
04:05was looking for just that. They needed content, they needed producers, they needed
04:09editors, and we were a match made in heaven. And now I'm still here today! So if you're
04:14looking for a career in media or something creative and you want a
04:18similar career path to me, here are my three main takeaways. Number one, constantly
04:24create. You don't need a fancy website. If you want to put your work out into the
04:28world, just put it on social media. And you don't need a lot of money. Number two, do
04:32not be afraid to take internships or low entry-level positions when you're
04:36starting in this field. This field is totally DIY. You just got to go in, start at the
04:41bottom, work your way up, and really, really bust your . And number three, never
04:46ever stop learning and growing. Even when you think that you've learned all there
04:50is to know, there is so much more knowledge and so many people all around you at
04:54all times that can teach you something new, that can just advance your career to
04:58the next level. So never think that you've hit the top. The most important
05:02thing to keep in mind is that everyone's career path is different and the timing
05:05is different for everyone, so you cannot compare yourself to people around you. I hope
05:09that was helpful and I hope you learned a lot about my career path. But as always, if
05:13you have any questions that I didn't answer, comment below and I'll try to
05:16answer them now. See you next time! Thanks so much for watching. Click here to
05:20watch another video on Refinery, here to subscribe to us on YouTube, and right
05:24here for my personal YouTube channel.
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