My Very Worst Internship

MVWJ was actually an unpaid internship my senior year in college. Due to a misunderstanding between my academic adviser and me, I had to take 21 credits the last semester of my senior year to graduate. One of those three credit courses was an internship through a local communications company owned by a mega-church, where I was to go in for 10 hours a week (about two hours a day after class five times a week).

Initially, I thought this sounded like a great gig–they owned three magazines, three radio stations and had several websites for things like music and Christian news and I would get to interview bands and hang out at concerts. Big mistake.

My first day, I was told to get the receptionist coffee and to deliver packages to a FedEx office. Not long after, the senior pastor of the church that owned the communications company was going to visit and I was literally given a roll of tape and told to wrap the tape around my hand–sticky side out–and to get down on my hands and knees and use the sticky side of the tape to get lint out of the royal purple carpet.

One of my supervisors was fine, but the other was a pompous bimbo who did nothing but steal articles off other internet websites, slap her name on them and turn them in for publication. How this escaped notice of legit organizations is beyond me. After less than two weeks, I had exhausted all of the writing they had available for me. I was then given tasks such as organizing photos and the supply cabinet and stuffing binders for the church’s next big sermon series. At this point, I was about eight weeks away from a degree in journalism and I felt like all of this was ridiculous.

The best part of the internship came at the end of the semester, when I sat down with my faculty adviser (who was also a professor in three other classes I had taken). The adviser told me my internship supervisor, the pompous bimbo, had written a horrible letter to him complaining about my work ethic, how I never showed up on time and how I brought a bad attitude into the office. She also said I never completed my hours of internship and refused sign off on my class credit.

My professor listened to my side of the story and signed off on my internship hours. Eight years later, I’m an award-winning newspaper reporter and the pompous bimbo never made a career in legitimate journalism. The magazines and websites are also now defunct.

Comments (14)

TheRestOfTheStoryJuly 21st, 2010 at 8:46 am

Did the word plagiarizer get turned into pompous bimbo? Or let me guess, she wouldn’t “flock” you.

LauraJuly 21st, 2010 at 10:15 am

Hey I’m impressed that you stuck in there. Thanks for reaffirming that hard work does pay off.

HedyJuly 21st, 2010 at 11:42 am

Interns have to do all sorts of s**t work, that’s called paying your dues. You start at the bottom. The only thing to complain about was the plagiarist.

rawrJuly 21st, 2010 at 1:27 pm

What about having to get the lint of of carpet by hand with tape instead of using a vacuum? That goes way beyond shit work and “paying your dues” into just plain fucking illogical.

SurrealJuly 21st, 2010 at 3:12 pm

That’s sounds crappy, even for an internship. Mainly the going on hand and knees with tape, and the bimbo refusing to sign off your hours. Ridiculous.

Frau BlucherJuly 21st, 2010 at 4:40 pm

paying your dues should not include carpet cleaning.

PandaJuly 21st, 2010 at 11:11 pm

If you’re told going in that your internship is going to consist of you going to concerts to interview bands, and are led to believe it’ll mainly be a writing internship, it’s going to feel a lot worse when you’re told to pick lint out of the carpet than if you knew going in that it was going to involve a lot of grunt work.

TMSJuly 22nd, 2010 at 10:57 am

There’s shit work and then there’s worse than shit work. Running a few errands I can see, but like others have pointed out, having to pull the lint out of the carpet with tape wrapped around your hand falls into the “worse than shit work” category.

Jade LynnJuly 23rd, 2010 at 7:30 am

Yeah, there’s grunt internship work and than there’s, “Oh! free slave labor work!” like picking lint off the carpet and than dealing with a pompous ass who gives you a bad review for the sake of giving you a bad review

HedyJuly 23rd, 2010 at 9:06 am

I’ve ended up doing much for for internships, and I have in fact asked interns working for me to do things others felt were illogical, but still had to be done – like using tape to get lint off curtains, straightening rugs and spending hour after hour shredding. These things still need to be done. Who do you expect would be the one to pick the lint off the purple carpet, if it were not the intern? When expecting the big boss to come in town, you want EVERYTHING to be perfect. I still think this person is being overly whiny.

MysteryGuestJuly 26th, 2010 at 3:59 am

I have to agree with Hedy here. I’ve had too many interns who felt they were above this or that. But this or that still needed to be done. This is why I’m reluctant to bother with them these days because after reserving all the exciting professional work for the intern, I end up working late with the link picking.

LouwiiJuly 28th, 2010 at 7:32 am

@Hedy & MysteryGuest

Who will do it? The janitor! Not a university student! He pays enough to get his education, he should be learning the skills needed for his future career, not go back to 16 years old’s summer jobs…

KellyKAugust 4th, 2010 at 11:03 am

I don’t think the poster is being unreasonable at all. The purpose of an internship is to gain work-related experience, not to give the supervising organization free labor. Using an unpaid or paid-below-minimum-wage intern for free menial labor is actually illegal, as best I can tell. (The sources below seem to make it pretty clear-cut, but I still say “as best as I can tell” since I’m not a lawyer or even a law student.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html
http://blog.nwjobs.com/careercenter/hiring_interns_for_free_labor_is_a_no-no.html
http://wislawjournal.com/article.cfm?recID=76753

As an *employee,* it’s reasonable to do occasional scut work that isn’t in your job description, because it needs to be done and because you’re getting paid. As an intern, not so much, unless you’re really looking to put “Cleaned lint off carpet. Provided receptionist with coffee.” on your resume.

TanekAugust 6th, 2010 at 11:36 am

Maybe I should post MVYJ where I spent an entire teaching assistantship copying worksheets for hours on end for days on end for weeks on end. But I was a student and it needed to be done, and I did it with a smile on my face because I was getting credit.

I wish I had gotten credit for taking lint out of carpets in college, I would have signed up every semester.

OP probably did show up late after he started hating the job.

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