While “the others,” as I call the Finance and Accounting majors, are embracing the sunshine that has started to trickle through the clouds in the pseudo-tease of spring, laughing horrendously in their career and internship security, I’m sitting inside a dark room, rapidly hitting “refresh” on my e-mail, checking my phone to see if maybe someone called to offer me summer employment and I just missed the call.
The summer internship process begins, as every college student knows, long before summer is even a viable dream. In the chill of winter, we sent out slightly exaggerated resumes, succinct, yet appealing, cover letters, and what we consider to be our “best” writing samples. The “real” majors, the ones that my father deems practical (a fact which, lately, I’ve had to come to accept as more true than I’d like it to be) met with recruiters, interviewed on-campus, and received job offers within days. These illustrious, shiny, Gatsby-esque internships are with banks, marketing firms, ad companies, and tech start-ups. The kids who get them have futures just as bright as the covetable paycheck they’ll receive. Takes money to make money? More like you have to take money to make money.
What about the English majors, though? What about the Psych majors, the Sociology concentrators, the creative writers, and the kids who still, at 21, have no idea what the hell they want to do with their lives? According to my current state of unemployment, my skills aren’t as marketable as somebody who is better at crunching numbers. I don’t know how to crunch numbers; I only know how to crunch popcorn really quietly so that my roommates can’t tell that I’m eating yet another snack in the other room.
I thought, maybe, that my e-mail was broken. I had my friends send me blank messages to prove that I was wrong. No, people were perfectly capable of contacting me. They just had chosen not to. Without many contacts in the industry that I want to pursue a career in, I had sent out a lot of cold e-mails. I assumed, out of the twenty I sent, maybe five would respond. Maybe, if my writing was even better than I thought it was, ten people would get back to me. I’d have to weigh my options before I chose the perfect internship for me to complete this summer. Magazines, newspapers, and online journals would have to compete for my services.
If only.
I still haven’t gotten an acceptance letter, phone call, IM, or owl.
Whatever, woe is me. At this point, it’s kind of funny. The only one out of my four roommates without summer plans lined up, I make myself the butt of the jokes because otherwise there’s a good chance I’ll start crying during girls’ wine night. Humor is your greatest weapon, if you know how to use it right. Plus, there are real problems in this world. I can cry or send unprompted, angrily worded e-mails to people who also have real problems and don’t have the time to indulge the offended would-be intern. Nor do they care.
Hopefully somebody will call me in the upcoming weeks, or at least send me a kindly worded rejection letter. Until then, I’ll just be here in my little dark room, eating popcorn really quietly.
Photo Sources:
http://thephantomparagrapher.blogspot.com/p/hire-me.html
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2012/06/25/will-toledo-ohio-be-the-first-…