A week in the life of a 22-year-old intern at ViacomCBS — Assembly

Shriya Boppana writes about scouting talent on TikTok, ensuring representation in media and her tips for breaking into the entertainment industry.

Shriya shares about a week in her life in October 2021.

Monday

Happy Monday! Nothing screams “fresh start to the week” like data tracking on Excel — but I absolutely love my job as an AwesomenessTV and Nickelodeon Talent Intern. I work remotely from near Washington, D.C. and collaborate with the AwesomenessTV and Nickelodeon talent teams at ViacomCBS in Los Angeles. My schedule is from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. while my West Coast co-workers have the pleasure of working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The main task on my agenda right now is talent scouting for season three of our hit YouTube Series “Awesomeness Next Influencer.” After our incredibly successful season two, we are looking for a cast that will bring drama, romance and friendship.

Before we jump into my day, I thought it would be beneficial to break down the big question: How exactly did I end up at ViacomCBS? If you’re like me and have always known you wanted to end up in the media and entertainment industry one day, it’s a crucial question to answer. ViacomCBS has a fantastic Campus to Career (C2C) program that focuses on internship and early career opportunities. As a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, I wanted opportunities that would lay the foundation for my future career goals. Initially browsing the C2C page, I looked for brands that I was already familiar with, which became really important during the interview process for my role.

Crucial tip #1 for getting into the media and entertainment industry as a non-entertainer: Brands will always ask you about their work during the interview process to ensure you are actually familiar with the content they produce and the platforms/mediums they stream on.

Now, onto my day! At 12 p.m., I log into my email only to be flooded with brand partnership emails from the talent managers of TikTok’s greatest stars. I watch as my team goes back and forth scheduling calls, inquiring about shoot dates and negotiating contract details. I set off on my search for the next big hit in Gen Z, scouring through Instagram feeds, YouTube videos, famous birthdays lists and trending TikTok pages. Updating our joint talent database as I go, I can’t help but notice how difficult some creators make it to find their contact information.

Crucial tip #2 for getting into the media and entertainment industry: If you’re hoping to be contacted by a talent scout, make sure you have information like age, geography and a contact method in your bio if you feel it’s safe to do so. This is so we know what your age range is when casting, whether you are allowed to work in our area of shooting and how to best contact you for an audition.

We’ve been talking about casting quite a bit, but what exactly does the casting process actually look like? The typical idea of casting that comes to mind is open call casting. This is when productions and companies put out a large call for artists and anyone is encouraged to apply. Then they are later called in to either audition together or one-by-one and get narrowed down. The approach we prefer to use for ANI (AwesomenessTV’s Next Influencer) is talent scouting. In this case, our team actively searches our databases of talent or talent readily available on the web for placement into our roles. The main difference between open call and talent scouting? Either you come to us or we go to you. We use both methods and they prove efficient in their own right depending on the intensity and scale of the project. However, a majority of our AwesomenessTV projects, from “Noah Beck Tries Things” to “Vibe Room” are based on talent we have worked with and know can deliver results.

Shriya Boppana is a 2021 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and was recently crowned Miss India America 2020. (Courtesy of Shriya Boppana)

Any meetings during the day take place around 3 p.m. but if not, I’ll step away for lunch. After lunch, I have the pleasure of resuming my search but with a friendly co-worker who actively searches with me. Together we chat and watch the never-ending content created by the internet’s latest sensations.

When it comes to searching, we’re careful in terms of what keywords we put into our online inquiries. Our goal at AwesomenessTV is simple: to have a cast that is diversely representative of our audience’s myriad of personalities and identities. We aim to showcase creators of different races, sexualities, genders and body types that make up the melting pot of our reality. The reality TV that we best know features the stereotypical mean girl or bad boy archetypes, but with those come the mostly-White actors that audition for the roles. We see it over and over again: White, heteronormative, Eurocentric-beauty-standard-abiding actors plastered across our screens. Awesomeness always aims for a cast that is at least 50% non-White, LGBTQ+ and/or non-cisgender.

Tuesday

Today is International Day of the Girl, how exciting! I work with the incredible nonprofit organization She’s the First as a Global Youth Ambassador advocating for girls’ rights all over the world. I was lucky enough to serve for three years as the She’s The First Carnegie Mellon University chapter president and now I wear my ambassadorship title proudly as I advance their mission through media and storytelling. Partners of The Obama Foundation and Michelle Obama’s Girls Opportunity Alliance, She’s The First holds an annual #GirlsGetLoud campaign that amplifies the voices of girls worldwide on platforms with monumental reach.

This year, I was paired with American actress and model Brooke Shields, best known for her roles in “Pretty Baby” and, my personal favorite, “Hannah Montana.” With an audience 1.3 million deep, I took over her Instagram to share my thoughts about advancing girls’ rights around the world. As an avid advocate of anti-sex trafficking, I chose to speak about sex education and reproductive rights, specifically on how social media is helping young women gain access to resources and health care training.

Girls demand to be respected and heard—on #DayOfTheGirl and every day. Yet millions of girls are denied their rights and the platforms to advocate for themselves. Let's make girls' voices the loudest today: go to https://t.co/Tt56JdjHyX to help #GirlsGetLoud! pic.twitter.com/0fdXMCSsbQ
— She's the First (@shesthefirst) October 11, 2021

The rest of my youth ambassador team partnered with artists, creators and leaders equally as wonderful. We saw our stories plastered across the Instagram pages of June Diane Raphael of “Grace and Frankie,” Meg Donnelly of “American Housewife,” Kirsten Vangsness of “Criminal Minds” and supermodel Imaan Hammam to name a few. However the story that touched my heart the most was shared by 18-year-old Rachel on Michelle Obama’s page. She grew up in Africa, living in a house that her mother built and was working to continue her education during the COVID-19 pandemic in a living situation that didn’t provide her access to the internet.

I spent the rest of my Tuesday basking in the glory of girl power, amidst the few haters commenting on every post. It’s important to understand that someone will always have something to say about every struggle happening in the world. Hard life lesson learned: The media and its opinions can be as powerful and uplifting as they are destructive.

Wednesday

Business as usual, back to the talent scouting grind. One of the most important parts of advancing diversity in casting is breaking archetypes. If we’re looking for the muscled player boy, instead of the typical black-haired White boy we’ll look for a buff Polynesian bisexual male or an Indian track star. If we’re looking for the trouble-causing flirt, rather than casting a typical blonde, White girl we want a plus-sized Filipina or Black girl in a wheelchair. Rather than focusing on only one type of diversity, AwesomenessTV and Nickelodeon actively look to counter ableism, sexism, racism, classism and all other forms of marginalization.

Crucial tip #3 for getting into the media and entertainment industry: Take pride in and emphasize the portions of your identity that you find most valuable. Whether that is being a disabled athlete or former beauty queen turned gamer girl, highlight those aspects of yourself so that casting teams can make quick, face-level placements for roles.

To end my day, I was able to touch base with one of the philanthropies I dedicate my time to: the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society (NMCRS). The NMCRS provides assistance in all shapes and forms to the naval service, family members and veterans. As a marine engineer, my dad spent a majority of his early career at sea and listening to his travel stories ignited my passion for learning more about the Marines. While service is slightly out of my comfort zone, I’m happy to be giving back to those who serve through my communications and marketing efforts.

“As a marine engineer, my dad spent a majority of his early career at sea and listening to his travel stories ignited my passion for learning more about the Marines.” (Courtesy of Shriya Boppana)

Thursday

As I sift through pages on Instagram, one of the biggest issues I face with finding talent is lack of translation across platforms. When an influencer gains a following on one social media platform, those followers will not always carry over to other platforms. For example, creators with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of TikTok views may only have a couple thousand followers on Instagram and YouTube.

Crucial tip #4 for getting into the media and entertainment industry: Engage your followers on more than one platform and offer diverse content. That way they have a reason to visit your page on all sites. The larger of an audience you reach, the more work potential you have. While TikTok is a great place to start, Instagram is ideal for brand partnerships and promotions while YouTube is the best for awards and invitations.

How come TikTok audiences are much easier to reach than audiences on any other social platform? Because TikTok allows you to create massive amounts of content without overwhelming your followers. Often, users are willing to follow more than one creator who makes a certain type of content, whereas on Instagram and Snapchat users would much rather choose a few people of importance to follow that make a specific type of content. This means non-mainstream creators must work harder to become authoritative voices in their space of the internet. This disproportionately affects creators with marginalized identities who are often overlooked for public-facing opportunities and paid less than their White counterparts for their work.

A great way to overcome this is with content houses and mass partnered creation. Incredible pages like the Pride House and Collab Crib bring together LGBTQ+ and Black creators to consistently put out cross-promotional content on each member’s pages. This allows them to gain maximum reach and provides easy access to talent managers to find a group of creators with the same identity. I was lucky enough to find some wonderful TikTokers like Queen Sierra and Evan Lane through this process who eventually starred in our season three cast.

We also do team meetings on Thursdays where we catch up on the multiple projects happening simultaneously in our crazy ecosystem. For example, we’ll be looking over performance numbers for the YouTube series “Ravon Tries Hot Summer Jobs” while scheduling another season of “Growing Up Eileen” and booking team members to make content for VidCon, an annual convention for fans, creators, executives and brands online.

I close out my Thursday with a few team calls for Bachpan Save the Innocence (BSTI). BSTI is an Indian child sexual assault education and prevention organization that does field work all across India. While I Zoom in virtually, my team on the ground delivers workshops and clinics in small rural villages and large-scale universities. Together we have sensitized more than 3,200 individuals at more than 60 orphanages, schools and colleges with over 10 different programs about topics like safe and unsafe touch, consent and puberty, digital safety, cybercrime, sexual abuse and trafficking. I serve on their facilitation and design team as a way to give back to my community back home. As an Indian immigrant and daughter of immigrants, the duality of my identity gives me space to constantly grow and evolve both parts. I genuinely believe focusing on social work in my home country gives me a sense of belonging and comfort that I’m never that far from my loved ones.

Friday

Friday is the best day in the office because of summer hours (which have continued into the fall!). We get to see the pitch decks for the week and leave early. My manager places heavy emphasis on taking summer Fridays as much as possible to soak in time outdoors and enjoy the good weather. He is an advocate for healthy breaks from work and balancing home and personal life.

I love using this time to look over critiques on the influencers in our database and make notes on which roles need to be filled the following week. Critiques are written assessments that help us decide whether a talent should be reached out to for an audition video. They’ll include details about energy levels, style of content, tone of voice, facial expressions and even outward appearance. If we like some aspects of a creator but not others, there is still a possibility they could wow us with a solid self-tape. But if there are too many factors missing, then we might not ask for a tape. In any given season, our casting crew goes through hundreds of auditions and we try to make that process as efficient as possible by taking early critiques seriously. I also have a chance to check in with team members on some tips and tricks for talent scouting and what worked and what didn’t. With all that information, we, next, look to fill roles that are undercast. If we have tons of creative hippies or loud drama queens, we’ll try to steer our focus on shy/quiet characters.

My favorite part of my job is getting to interact with cast members and influencers we book for shows because they are balls of personality on and off screen. I’ve had the pleasure of befriending Jake Clark over SpongeBob paintings, Carrie Berk over casting tips, Owen Holt over intro and outro filming and Dawn Morante over mental health discussions. I hope to find myself on the West Coast as soon as possible to see these incredibly dedicated creators work their magic in real time.

Shriya Boppana

(she/her) is a 2021 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. Recently crowned Miss India America 2020 and a fierce advocate against gender-based violence, child sexual assault and sex trafficking, Shriya focuses on the dangers of psychological media distortion in activism. Follow along on her journey on Instagram or learn more about her on her website.