Trapped in summer intern-ment

When we were children, summers meant nothing more than three months of running through sprinklers and watching massive amounts of television. Now that we are older, summers are no longer simply a break between two school semesters, but an extension of school itself, ripe with opportunities for personal edification. This is at least part of what students expect when they send out cover letters and résumés for summer internships. They dream pretty daydreams about bumping into someone important in the company elevator or wowing bosses and co-workers with their Columbia-cultivated intelligence and problem-solving skills.

And when students finally reach home after the first day on the job, this is why they are so disappointed to have done nothing for nine hours besides collating documents and filling out mail slips. There are of course many companies who provide their interns with meaningful, career-related work. All too often, however, there’s a stark disconnect between what students anticipate their internship opportunities to be like and what those experiences actually are.

Perhaps the foundation for this disconnect is laid by an entertainment industry that hyperbolizes reality and sensationalizes the mundane. Movies like “Almost Famous” and “The Devil Wears Prada” suggest a kind of glamour to the internship experience—one-on-one interactions with company executives, special events and parties with celebrities, a salary that can allow for Chanel boots or Hermes ties. Reality shows do the same, playing up the excitement and drama of work rather than the drudgery. “The Apprentice,” for example, has contestants compete in entertaining, creative business challenges that seem so much more fun than the kind of work actually performed by interns in most businesses.

Not only are internships fast-paced and dramatic in these depictions, but they also ultimately serve the intern as much they do the company—the final scene of a bildungsroman, so to speak. It’s a narrative we’d like so much to apply to ourselves—a narrative where jobs become more than the simple exchange of goods and services, one in which internships are a vehicle for one’s own actualization. There’s an expectation in internships of finding oneself or discovering one’s potential, which is ultimately more important than acquiring boring office skills. The roles become reversed in a way, with valuable improvements and noticeable results that are not the intern’s duty to the company, but the other way around.

This sense of entitlement, however, isn’t solely the result of distorted media portrayal. To some extent, universities help promote these illusions by packaging the ideal internship experience alongside the ideal college experience. Admissions information sessions and brochures at Columbia highlight the University’s dedication to making internships accessible to students—giving Fridays off, for example—while simultaneously drawing attention to the University’s location in New York City, home to the most prestigious and coveted of employment opportunities. The Columbia admissions website tells inspiring tales of art history majors who score internships at the Met and future engineers whose internships help them discover their passions. Dull, mindless nine-to-five jobs are the lot of the middle-aged and uneducated, the implicit argument goes. Being a college student graduating from an Ivy League university entitles you to unique, exceptional opportunities. It’s no surprise that we expect stimulating, life-altering internship experiences, because, in a way, we are promised one.

And so, while job-hunting, we skim over the more pertinent and practical details, like job descriptions that involve phone-answering and photocopying with miniscule stipends, and instead focus on the impossible standards and expectations delivered to us through TV screens and admissions material.

There are many things wrong with today’s internship culture. Our current corporate environment is such that full-time positions often require prior internship experience, leaving many students with no option but to work long hours for little to nonexistent pay. We can’t change job requirements and we can’t change salaries, but one thing we do have control over is our own expectations. Instead of approaching internships with unrealistic hopes of adventure or influence or self-actualization, perhaps we should be more honest with ourselves about what internships are truly good for: exercising responsibility and self-reliance, mastering general and useful office skills, researching possible career paths. As more informed and conscientious job-hunters, we’ll begin placing a higher premium on all the right things—intern responsibilities and skills, the ability to interact with mentors, reasonable pay and hours—while resisting the simple allure of a brand-name company or big city. Hopefully employers will take note of our new priorities (and the shrinking pile of qualified applicants) and will be forced to meet us halfway, striking a fair balance between fetching coffee and bumping elbows with celebrities. And, maybe, that’s how we will ultimately find the job satisfaction we seek.

Aarti Iyer is a Columbia College senior majoring in creative writing. She is the editor-in-chief of "The Fed". Culture Vulture runs alternate Tuesdays.