You basically have to be vetted or recommended by someone. Usually it’s a carousel of internships/assistant jobs - work as an assistant at a mgmt co or agency, where you’re interacting with writer’s assistants (their boss is the agency/mgmt’s client). Or at a production company. Or in a casting office. And so forth in jobs where you begin to know people and just as important where others know you. Assistants tend to recommend other assistants as they are usually the first people the staff writers or showrunner will ask if they need folks. More on reddit.com

I assume you mean writer's assistant on a TV show. Short answer: Move to Los Angeles. NYC has 6-7 shows with rooms in NYC (I may have changed since I left NYC 2 years ago). Los Angeles has hundreds. It's just math at that point. You can't be a writer's assistant unless you're in the room. Longer Answer: Writing assistant jobs are absurdly competitive. Again, at any given time there are maybe 300-500 (and this number might actually be high) shows with rooms going, which means that there's only about 300-500 writer's assistant jobs and thousands of people vying for these jobs. I say this not to discourage you, but to let you know how valuable these jobs are. These aren't jobs that you get by just having a friend make a call or by finding a job posting on your school board. So there are two obstacles. 1) Finding an opening and 2) Being qualified enough to be considered. 1 is a pain in the ass. It means doing unpaid or lightly paid intern work, showing up on time and ready to work, never saying no to anything that's not illegal. Oh, and also a barrel of luck. You need to be the star intern, the hardest worker, the earliest riser, etc. Because the way these happen is that a writer or producer puts a call into the people they know saying "I need a writers assistant." The person (an agent, manager, producer, whatever) then says "I have the perfect person." And through a combination of that person's guilt and your absurdly impressive work ethic, your name has to be the first thing that comes to mind. But in the best case scenario, that gets you an interview. Now you have to be the one hired from 8 equally impressive and hardworking candidates. So can you do the job? A writer's assistant is a glorified note-taker/office manager. Do you know how to create an invoice? Do you know how to create an expense report? Do you know how to create a payroll report? Can you take notes in 4 different revision modes? Can you fix Adobe Acrobat when it crashes? Can you loop 6 people into a call when they're in four different time zones? There's a hundred million of these problems every day and its your job to fix it. The showrunner is going to dealing with studio notes, actor headaches, production schedules, etc. They do not have the time or bandwidth to fix a printer or make sure their flight is running on time, or remember that suggestion that a writer made. Hopefully that is helpful. More on reddit.com

I've been a writers' assistant on a couple hour-long dramas shows, and it is pure, uncut awesome. However, it's also an almost impossible job to get and once you have it, incredibly exhausting. I've also being a WA for a screenwriter, which involved a little bit of research and a lot of running errands and grocery shopping. Not a bad job at all -- actually kind of fun, if you're the kind of person who likes to tackle problems and track down special requests -- but it didn't give me much training as a writer. I do have an MFA, and the degree itself has almost nothing to do with how I do my job. However, being in school made me a much more attractive intern candidate, and it was an internship on a tv show that helped me find work when I first starting out. However, anyone can be a student for $200 worth of credits at a community college, so that's no reason to enroll in film school. I am not yet a staff writer, but I have gotten some freelance assignments (where they pay you for the script, but you're not a weekly employee of the show), so things are headed in the right direction. There is such a thing as a bad writers' assistant, and those people end up fired. (Or, what I think is worse, not fired but given a new job outside of the room and forbidden to come back in. Which means spending six months feeling like a colossal screwup, and everyone you work with knowing you're a colossal screwup.) Fast, accurate typing is a must; ability to listen closely and capture every detail/nuance of what's said is another. Also knowing when to keep your mouth shut and not chime in; not being offended or grossed out by extreme pitches or jokes in the room. At this point in my career, I've picked up on a pretty clear cut pattern where WAs are concerned. The job basically comes in three flavors: Serfs - These poor bastards work for showrunners who stumbled into television writing. Maybe their bosses used to be lawyers or doctors, or their first job was working on a show where their college roommate was the star. Regardless, the showrunner doesn't perceive the assistant as a human being with wants and needs. The WA is there to take notes, period. WAs with these jobs have no shot whatsoever of getting staffed. That doesn't mean there isn't something to be gained by working on such a show, but there's no point in staying. Buddies - Sometimes I think these people have it even worse than the serfs. They get hired because the showrunner is inexperienced and knows it, with a resulting fear of screwing up horribly. Sometimes these WAs are college students, sometimes they're slightly dim people in over their heads, sometimes they're just straight up very, very attractive and nothing else. They get hired because their showrunner doesn't want capable, smart writers' assistants, because a) it makes him feel even worse when their assistant is better at their job than the showrunner is at his; b) that's just one less person to be blamed when it all goes to hell. It sounds like it should be an incredible lucky break -- wow, I get to do this awesome job even though I'm not even done with school and/or don't know what I'm doing? Sign me up! But it's really hard to learn anything on a show where the showrunner is in over his head and himself doesn't know what he's doing; it's very stressful working on a show that's continually on the brink of collapsing in on itself from incompetence; and maybe most importantly, you'll leave this job thinking you must be hot shit, and it will be a long, humiliating voyage to discovering the truth, with many terribly job interviews and outright firings along the way, before you finally realize that you don't actually know anything about being a WA and have to start from scratch. Undercover Viking - Basically, all WA jobs start out looking either like Serf or Buddy gigs. It's just not possible to tell ahead of time if that's all they are, or if -- maybe, if you are awesome at your job, and have the patience of a granite boulder -- they could turn into Undercover Viking gigs. But these jobs do exist, and they are the whole reason anyone ever wants to be a writers' assistant. You might even start out purely as a serf or a buddy or some combination of these, but you keep working as hard as you possibly can, learning and getting better at your job all the time, and at some point, probably a season into the show or more, your boss will say "Could you do X?" And so you do X, and you do a good job at it, so then you get to asked to do Y, and then Z, and then boom! You're a writer. But the tricky part is that you have to start by tackling the job with total focus, not expecting it to lead to anything, just trying to be as good at your job as humanly possible. About half the time, this leads to becoming a writer, but the rest of the time, you don't realize that your job is actually a Serf or Buddy job and you're not going anywhere. That's when you have to start looking for another job. More on reddit.com

I was a showrunners' assistant and then a writers' assistant. I first started as an assistant to a TV lit agent. Quite a few people start as assistants at agency or management companies in order to get enough experience and contacts to make the move to a writers' room. I've been in charge of hiring writers' PAs several times. One person I hired was a set PA during the pilot shoot, one was a former intern from the studio, and one was the post production PA on the show's previous season. I did not publicly list the positions as I would have been overwhelmed by thousands of resumes (as you said these jobs are highly coveted). I just asked people I knew (execs, agents, other assistants) if they had anyone to recommend. If you have no experience or contacts, it's much easier to get hired in another assistant gig (agency, management, studio, PA) and then transition to a writers' room. More on reddit.com