Alan Williams is the director for Imaginary Forces, a creative company specializing in visual storytelling and brand strategy. Imaginary Forces make design-driven content for a wide range of partners and projects. With studios in both Los Angeles and New York, Imaginary Forces is powered by talented individuals working together to push the limits of creative possibility.
Alan Williams lived most of his childhood in a treehouse in the hills of NC. He is confident that this, along with his lifelong interaction with pop-up books, film, and sketch pads, has led to an obsession with the imaginative. While pursuing his bachelor’s in English he began delving into the fantastical world of computer arts which led to him earning an MFA in Motion Media Design at Savannah College of Art & Design. Today, Alan Williams is an Emmy-nominated director for Imaginary Forces NYC, but if you can catch him in line for a coffee (iced, even in the dead of winter), smoking a pipe in his garden, or roaming the North Carolina wilderness, he’d much rather plumb the depths of his choice topic: storytelling.
Want to be a part of a brand-new and exciting team forming at the Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship? Applications are OPEN for Davidson College students looking for on-campus employment for the 2018-19 school year. Join us, a.k.a. The Hub Herd Apply on Handshake TODAY!
Who are we looking for?
Community & Event Ambassadors (4 positions available):Support The Hurt Hub@Davidson staff with hospitality and event logistics for the community. Bring your energy and flexibility to this hands-on role! your energy and enthusiasm to this role!
Resident Vlogger: Support The Hurt Hub@Davidson in telling its stories through a brand new Hurt Hub “vlog” (video blog)! Do you want to be a student voice for The Hurt Hub@Davidson? Do you have a knack for creative communication and the ability to spin happenings in a fun and engaging way? This job is for you.
Resident Designer: Support The Hurt Hub@Davidson in designing both print and online materials that further the mission of our community. As the Resident Designer, you will work on projects that include posters, social media graphics, website updates and other projects that relate to The Hurt Hub around major events & programs. Benefits of this job:
Get hands-on experience working with a freelance designer
Access to Adobe Creative Cloud for project work (through laptop loaner provided by The Hurt Hub@Davidson)
Free admittance to a professional Adobe InDesign workshop.
Video Journalist: Support The Hurt Hub@Davidson in telling its stories through short, engaging videos. As a Video Journalist, you are a jack of all trades in journalism and will act as producer, reporter, video operator and video editor!
Social Media Guru: Support The Hurt Hub@Davidson with all social media communications. As the Social Media Guru, you are responsible for Flywheel Coworking Davidson and The Hurt Hub@Davidson Hub social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram).
Resident Storyteller: Support The Hurt Hub@Davidson in telling its stories through prose. As the Resident Storyteller, your “beat” is to share the experiences of others, whether that’s a local entrepreneur working out of The Hurt Hub, a student startup team, an alumni making waves in their industry or a high-profile event coming to campus!
Andrew shares his summer experience working with & learning from Tech Talent South in Charlotte, NC.
Six months ago I guarantee you that coding was not even close to being on my mind. A month before summer, however, I somehow managed to land an internship with an incredible coding education company called Tech Talent South. Not entirely sure what I was getting myself into, I came to work on the first day dressed in a formal business attire ready to get my hands dirty. I was immediately reminded that this was a startup and that the team members wear jeans and t-shirts to work. I wasn’t complaining…
I quickly adapted to the culture of the company, which was characterized by a deep respect for one another and an unrelenting desire to better the company and our students. My role has been to assist the marketing and sales team, but as the summer has gone along, I’ve been able to get a taste for almost every branch of the company from finance and business development, to operations, and lastly… computer programming.
After two weeks of interning, I began taking Tech Talent South’s Code Immersion course which was a 4 hour a day, 5 days a week, intensive full stack web development course. We covered the basics of HTML, CSS, & JavaScript before diving deep into Ruby, a backend language, on the Rails framework. While I am still deep in the course at the moment, it has proven to be an immensely challenging, yet incredibly fun part of my summer.
What has made my summer particularly interesting and fruitful has been the array of experiences and people I have met. From coding in the mornings, to meetings with community members at Advent Co-Working during lunch, to helping to run and understand the business in the afternoons, I have stayed plenty busy and learned an incredible deal about how startups are created and operated.
My goal for this summer is to draw from the many experiences and people that I have been able to learn from this summer and apply those to personal entrepreneurial endeavors that I am pursuing. It has been rewarding being able to supplement the Davidson academic curriculum with some amazing opportunities to get my hands dirty as I understand the workings of a successful and local startup at Tech Talent South.
