I Quit My CS Internship to Edit Student Films and I Don’t Know If I’m Being Stupid
I’m sitting in the back of my usual coffee shop right now, laptop open to two windows. Left one is the half-updated resume I’m supposed to send to the fintech HR team. Right one is the timeline of a 15-minute short I’m editing for a friend, and there’s a crumb of blueberry scone stuck in the trackpad that I can’t be bothered to pick out. My oat latte’s been cold for 45 minutes. I came here to make a decision, and I still haven’t made it.
I graduated from my state school’s CS program three months ago. Had a full-time offer locked in since last summer, starting salary that’s twice what any entry-level film gig pays, good benefits, all that. I talked them into a 12-month deferral so I could “test out this film thing” I’d been obsessing over since sophomore year, when I skipped my algorithms midterm review to film a skate video for the campus club and stayed up 36 hours editing it and realized that was the first time I didn’t check the clock every 10 minutes waiting to be done. My old Sedgewick algorithms textbook is still on my desk at home, spine broken, pages only marked up through chapter 4. After that I was skipping too many lectures to care.
Last week I went to a little indie filmmaker meetup at a bar downtown, bought a $7 beer I couldn’t really afford, stood around awkwardly for an hour before anyone talked to me. When a guy who runs a small production company finally asked what my background was, I said CS, and he lit up and went “Oh perfect! We’ve been needing someone to build our new website.” I said I actually wanted to edit, I’d do it for free for a credit, and he nodded and said that was cool, then turned back to the NYU film grad next to him and didn’t talk to me again. I left before the end, finished my beer on the walk home, got a rainstorm on my new white sneakers that never did come clean.
The weird thing is, my CS background does help more than I expected. Last month a friend’s project got all screwed up when their render kept crashing at 90% done, everyone was panicking because they had a festival deadline that night. I messed around with an ffmpeg script I hacked together a while back, fixed it in 12 minutes, and everyone stared at me like I was a wizard. But half the time that’s all anyone asks me for – help with gear, help coding weird little editing shortcuts, help fixing broken exports. It feels like I’m still just the tech guy, not the person actually making the thing that matters, the thing that makes people feel something. That’s what I came here for, right?
I spent six months on my own short last year. Wrote it, begged friends to act in it for free, filmed it on my old camera I bought with internship money, edited it, paid a sound designer $500 I couldn’t really spare to fix the messy audio. Sent it to 17 small festivals. Got 16 rejections. The 17th acceptance was from a tiny student festival that charges you $50 to screen it, so I didn’t go. I didn’t even tell most people I’d made it. I just left the file in a folder on my desktop and haven’t opened it since.
Now my deferral’s up in two months. I have three options, basically. One, take the fintech job. Keep doing film on the side. But I know me – I came home from my internship every day last summer and just sat on the couch scrolling TikTok, I didn’t have enough brain left to open Premiere Pro. I know if I take that job, I’ll stay there. It’s comfortable, it pays off my student loans fast, my parents will stop looking at me like I’m having a midlife crisis at 22. Two, get a tech job in film – VFX engineering, color pipeline, something like that. Pays almost as well as fintech, it’s in the industry. But it’s still coding all day, just for different clients. I didn’t switch to do the same thing I already didn’t love in a different building. Three, say fuck it, turn down the offer, move to LA, crash on my roommate’s cousin’s couch, hustle for PA jobs, work my way up to editing. But I have $28k in student loans. My mom cries a little every time we talk about this, says she worked extra custodial shifts at the local school district to help pay for my tuition so I wouldn’t have to struggle like she did.
Last week at my cousin’s birthday, my uncle asked what I was up to, I said I was doing film, he joked and asked if I could get him a Netflix discount, and everyone laughed. I laughed too, but it made my face hot. I don’t even know what I’m doing, let alone get streaming perks.
Sometimes I think I’m just running from imposter syndrome in CS. I got good grades, got the offer, but I always felt like I was faking it, like one day someone would realize I don’t actually understand dynamic programming that well. But now I’m faking it in film too, so that can’t be it. I just like cutting clips together until they feel like a story, that’s all. I can’t explain it better than that.
The recruiter just texted me, asking if I can confirm my start date by the end of the week. I haven’t replied. The scone crumb’s still in the trackpad. I’m looking at the short I’m editing now, it’s about a kid who quits his stable office job to hike the Appalachian Trail, and I’m cutting the scene where he’s sitting on a rock wondering if he made the wrong choice, and it’s weird how that mirrors my own shit, right? I thought writing this down would help me sort it out. It didn’t. I still don’t know if I’m being brave or just an idiot who threw away a good thing for a hobby. If anyone’s been here, what did you do? I’m all ears.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » I Quit My CS Internship to Edit Student Films and I Don’t Know If I’m Being Stupid