A Story about an Internship gone wrong…

The summer of 2009 was supposed to be one of those memorable summers that Jaime would look back on with a smile..thinking of hot summer flings, nights with her friends having a little too much fun, laying out in the sun (with her 45 on of course), and obviously an exciting internship M-F working for Hugefirm & Busywork, a well-known consulting firm. She worked here the summer after her sophomore year in college. Freshman year was a blast and by the end of it she made some amazing friends, met some really cute boys, had about 5 epiphanies of what her major and career path should be, and of course lined up a summer internship to help her put her skills and talents to use.

So, day 1 of Jaime’s summer began on Monday at 8 AM after a 45 minute commute to Hugefirm & Busywork. Upon arriving there her internship “mentor” greeted her with a firm handshake, a nice smile, and a 2 foot stack of papers. And so her task began: sorting out the stack in alphabetical order. Fun…

By the end of week 1 Jaime became the top intern in their floor branch. She was always the first one to finish sorting through the files, whether putting them in alphabetical order or inputting numbers in which she had no idea what their values meant into a simple excel spreadsheet. Challenging..

Week 3 arrives and Jaime is ready to start picking up the pace. She wants to talk to clients. She wants to work with the team on big tasks. She’s ready to get in the game. After talking to her “mentor” she is finally given a task with more responsibility. The team’s latest project is to develop a formal business development campaign for the launch of a new tech website. We’re talking event planning, online and live PR, flier and poster designs, SEO, website appearance, the works. Jaime is pumped to get to work. Yay…

Week 4 arrives and at least now she is getting to do some cool things on excel like make PivotTables. Ooo. Her mentor approaches her to finally discuss her involvement in the business development project. She explains to Jaime that they have made a lot of progress but many of the minor details still need to be addressed. The t’s need crossing, the i’s need dotting—that sort of thing. So, Jaime’s task isssss… Proofreading. (I guess she was being serious about those t’s and i’s)

Month one of Jaime’s internship is now completed. She hopes maybe the first month was just a test to see that she was capable of smaller things and that her final month will give her the experience she has been looking to get.

Week 5 arrives and Jaime is skeptical. Losing some of her motivation she decided to go out the night before and is unfortunately a bit hung-over. (tisk tisk). Upon entering the office in the morning she sees her mentor seems extremely stressed, as if she has more work than she knows how to handle. Excited that Jaime might be finally doing something with meaning today she approaches her boss to ask her if she can lend a hand. Her boss looks up frantically, explaining she is dead tired from lack of sleep and all she really needs is a cup of coffee. She asks Jaime to go down to the lobby and fetch one for her. Splenda! (yes I know that’s a terrible pun)

Day 1 of Week 6 arrives. Jaime has had it up to here with this stupid internship at this stupid firm. She is annoyed that they wasted her time for a measly $7 an hour. (I mean c’mon you can’t even go see a movie anymore for less than $10). If only she had known that this internship was complete and utter bull$*&@ she could have found one that would actually put her skills and talents to use and helped her to stand apart from the rest.

So, yes, Jaime’s summer weekends were filled with a few hot summer flings, great nights with her friends and a few trips down the shore. However, her Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from when she woke up at 6:30AM until she left the office at 5:30PM were—how should I put this—a big Fu!!ing waste of time. At least now she put on her resume she got the reward for Most Outstanding Intern...future employers won’t know this came from her uncanny ability to file and input data at an outstanding pace.

Next summer Jaime plans on researching internship reviews and ratings on UltimateIntern.com to make sure this doesn’t happen again.