Summer is a time for going to the pool, sleeping in, late nights with your friends, trips to the beach…just kidding you don’t do any of that because you have a job! No more sleeping ‘til noon and having a whole day of freedom. Summers in college are spent making money and boosting those resumes. Some venture off in new cities, others stay home and drive their parents crazy. (Shoutout to you Mom, I know you’re reading this) This year I am interning at the same place I did last summer, so you would think I know the ropes. Wrong.
Here is just a sample of mishaps I have encountered throughout my internship and I pray to God I’m not alone in some of these… anyone? Anyone? Beuller?
1. Navigating around the building
A new job in a new building is scary yet exciting. New ground to explore, but also new ground to get lost on. As an intern, a lot of duties consist of delivering things around the office or doing work for other departments on different floors. People sometimes forget that you are brand new to the building and don’t have any idea where things are. Where I work spans across 6 floors. SIX! That is a lot of ground to cover and it doesn’t help that every floor looks exactly the same. Let’s take for example Day 1 on the job. My ID card to access the building hadn’t been activated yet and I need that to go from floor to floor on the elevator. Given an assignment on a different floor, I was told to use the stairs, meaning the internal stairs that go throughout the company’s 6 floors. Completely forgetting about those stairs I went to the 87 thousand degrees stairwell of the whole building and got down 1 floor when I saw the black ID swipe box. You guessed it; I needed my ID to get myself out of the stairwell. GREAT. Day 1, they don’t even know me yet, how are they going to realize I’m gone? 20 minutes passed and I thought for sure the stairwell was going to be my place of death. Let me tell you that stairwell was not a high traffic area. Nobody was coming to rescue me anytime soon. Finally my brain started working again and I realized if I went all the way down to the bottom I’d have to be able to exit at the lobby level right? Thank God that worked out because I don’t think I would have made it back up 18 flights if it didn’t. I navigated myself back up somehow and the girl next to me asked if I got any paper cuts while filing papers. A PAPERCUT?! I was just trapped in a stairwell for 20 minutes sweating my butt off but no don’t worry; I didn’t get any paper cuts.
2. Printing problems
Believe it or not, as an intern I do a lot of printing and copying. Crazy, I know. While learning my way around a new building, I’m also new to these fancy shmancy machines they have that can print something, double sided, 18 copies, in color, and staple them together all in about 30 seconds. Why do they even need interns anymore? That printer is more efficient than me! Regardless, I’m still asked to print a lot of stuff. Well which printer do I send it to? There are 4 different printers surrounding me and they all seem to have different features. Let’s not forget when I had to print name cards on special paper that you have to manually feed in. Except you don’t know when someone else is printing to that printer, so their stuff ends up on your paper and you have to find that person and explain and things get awkward. Or when you’re on a time crunch and your running around printing and the paper runs out and you don’t know which tray to refill because apparently printers have 5 different trays with 5 different kinds of paper now so that’s fun. And you have to ask someone what tray it is and you just want to scream SORRY, I’M NEW HERE.
3. Phone calls
Making phone calls wouldn’t be that much of a problem except that everyone around me can hear every word. I share a cubicle with another girl, there are 4 other people that sit directly behind and next to me and other than that it is dead silent. So when someone is talking, everyone can hear. So when I have to tell the person on the other end that no, I don’t know the answer to their question, I’m just the intern, everybody knows I just messed something up. Fortunately though, because I am an intern, my phone isn’t ringing off the hook. Although when I do have to make calls, I have to remember to dial 9+1 before dialing the number. Well, I took that as dial 9+1, and then 1(222)-222-2222. WRONG. Long story short I dialed 9+1 like I was supposed to, then 1 before dialing the number. If you didn’t follow that comes out to 911, and I’ll just leave the rest of the story to your imagination.
4. Absolutely nothing
Some days it is nonstop work, but others can be pretty slow. Quite frankly interns can be limited on what they can and cannot do because of their lack of knowledge. Not because we’re not smart enough but because we don’t learn how to use certain programs or we don’t have access to certain things and others just don’t have time to sit down and show us. Also we are still college students so we haven’t learned everything there is to know about this field. Some of us aren’t even working in the field we study. We can’t do certain technical stuff because we don’t know how. So sometimes you are left twiddling your thumbs. After doing a round of asking everyone if they need any help with anything that ends in a resounding “No, but I’ll let you know!” you’re left with nothing (Hence writing this article). It’s awkward because you feel like you should be doing something, but you’ve asked around and nobody has anything for you. And you don’t want to pester them by asking them constantly, but you don’t want them to forget about you either. It’s hard to do nothing. Seriously. You don’t want to be caught on Facebook or playing on your phone. Or caught mid snap-chat. So you check your e-mail. And you check it again. Then you go to the bathroom and maybe walk around. Refill your water bottle. And then you quickly check Instagram just in case anything has happened since you last checked 10 minutes ago. Then you look up your co-workers in the office directory and see where they live. Definitely creepy. But definitely passes time.
So by now you’re probably thinking that I am a complete idiot and how did I ever get this job but hey, we all start at the bottom at some point. I’ll spare you the Drake lyrics…
Nobody is expected to come in their first day and know exactly how to get around the building, know how to work the printer, be comfortable answering questions you don’t know the answer to, and to be able to do everything that a full time employee can do. You are an intern. You are there to learn and ask questions. Sometimes people might forget that you are new but don’t feel bad if you need to remind them that you don’t know something. Don’t be afraid to ask for help because they would rather you ask for help than do something wrong. Don’t feel bad if you have trouble with the printer, mess up a phone call or don’t have anything to do. Although I don’t recommend getting yourself stuck in the stairwell on your first day. That wasn’t fun. And don’t accidentally dial 911. Also not fun.
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