It started as a fun idea. Get an internship, pretend to be a grown-up, wear professional looking clothes, all while getting school credit and getting paid.
What followed was definitely not something that an ~Internship: How to~ post you read somewhere on thought catalog could guide you through.
Monday, May 11, 2015, My First Day.
I had a final the previous Thursday, packed on Friday, came from Boone to Raleigh Friday night, watched my brother graduate from N.C. State on Saturday and then again on Sunday (two ceremonies because he’s apparently special), and now after a whirlwind I’m sitting in my very own cubicle while IT comes and sets me up with two Macs. Two.
I have my own phone line, email address, and even a professional-looking signature on my email. I don’t even have to come into work until 8:30am and I get to leave at 5:00pm, although I don’t head home, but that’s for another post.
Sounds great, right? If you said yes, I’m lol-ing at you. You should keep reading if you plan to be an intern, because what one learns in a college lecture isn’t sh*t for what the real world is – even my pretend-intern-real world.
To get into the business school at Appalachian, one has to pass a computer proficiency test, take the regular accounting classes that kick you in the a**, and other core business classes. I’ve only taken two marketing classes for my major, and yet, I thought I was ready to take this internship by storm.
The storm ended up being the internship and I was more like a little baby tree that kept swaying in the wind trying to not fall over in the storm. Sort of like a weeble wobble.
My first tasks seemed like typical intern grunt work. Move these files. Reorganize these files. Put these files in alphabetical order. Once I found out that I could use headphones and play music, I would happily do whatever filing work they needed. I was getting paid to be the file girl but the funny thing is that it was weirdly soothing. I got to play whatever music I wanted and because it was so tedious it took about three days. These tasks went on for about a week and a half and I was kind of happy with it.
Then came the graphic design. Summer Membership Meeting is the biggest event of the year for this company. It’s basically like their New York Fashion Week, but it’s at the beach and tons of bigwigs come. My task: Design a brochure and flyer for the sponsorship program (aka how they get all of their revenue) and separate brochure and flyer for a special breakfast for even more important people and their super neat technology.
Normally I would be okay with coming up with the ideas for this. I love this stuff. Except for the fact that I’m a marketing major and so far I’ve only had lectures straight from the books. Advertising majors get all the cool technology classes on Adobe and learn how to make their ideas become real tangible things on a Mac. I wanted to retreat back into being the file girl, and yet I wanted to succeed at something I had no idea how to do.
So far, everything I learned in class wasn’t worth sh*t. Literally. My advice: While you obviously need to take class seriously, explore on your own. Take electives that you’re interested in.
LEARN ADOBE INDESIGN. This isn’t for the weak of mind. I’ve been trying to teach myself for the past two and a half weeks and I want to chop my fingers off and have talked myself out of throwing my computer against the wall about five times.
It’s been three weeks of being an intern, and I still have no friends in the town. Somehow I didn’t anticipate this although I’m interning in a city I’m not from. Oops.
My boss’s boss’s boss told me I should look into a summer fling… I’ll keep you updated on that.
xoxo,
Intern(ally) Struggling