Now, imagine a design you helped create at that dream co-op plastered all over an MTV award show.
Digital media student Chelsea Myers made those fantasies her own reality last month.
The 21-year-old said she was tasked with helping Yesenia Perez-Cruz, the senior interactive designer (and former Dragon!), come up with concepts for the Online Music Awards’ logo—something Happy Cog has done for the past three years.
“I came up with about 40 different concepts and Yesenia picked one. She cleaned it up and sent it to MTV along with two other designs,” Myers said. “A few days later, she told me MTV had selected my concept. I was in shock.”
Myers, who is working out of Happy Cog’s Philadelphia office, said she never thought her work would be seen by a company like MTV, let alone have it selected to be a major event’s logo.
“At that point, I just thought it was to be used on their website,” Myers said.
But one day before the awards show, Perez-Cruz sent Myers an Instagram photo of a stage with her logo painted on it.
When Myers tuned into the Online Music Awards show on June 19, she was speechless.
“I saw the concept everywhere,” Myers said. “It was projected onto floors, animated on screens, painted on stages and posters. I even saw some of my favorite bands play on top of it.”
Myers said choosing to attend Drexel was a no-brainer. In high school, she said she was split between becoming a Web developer and an animator. Drexel was one of the universities she knew of that offered a major that lets students learn both.
“Majoring in digital media allowed me to take animation and Web classes side by side and then choose what I loved the most,” she said.
Now a junior, Myers said she has fallen in love with Web development and hopes to become a front-end developer for a Web design agency someday.
Happy Cog was always Myers’s first choice for co-op, but it was a “reach,” she said. Not only was the company not hiring, but it also wasn’t affiliated with Drexel’s co-op program, Myers said.
That didn’t deter her, though.
“I utilized my co-op adviser, Michelle Mignot, to find a contact in the company,” Myers said. “She helped me with every step. She helped me test my online résumé and write my contact letter. She also kept me updated on what Happy Cog was doing with my résumé and if there were any other steps I needed to take.”
Finally, after a two-month wait, Happy Cog’s vice president of design, Chris Cashdollar (also a Drexel alum!), offered Myers a position.
“I was thrilled,” Myers said. “I never went into my co-op thinking something like this would happen. I still really can’t believe it happened. It was a wonderful feeling to have reality triple my expectations of what I was going to get out of this co-op experience.”