(Part 1: The Obligatory Bad College Internship Experience)

Like most other college students, I have had the obligatory Bad Internship Experience. It was my first internship ever, working at an education nonprofit. Fresh out of my first year at Scripps, I had high hopes for the summer, and was woefully disappointed. However, finding out what didn’t work for me in a workplace was invaluable, and even helped led me to my current path in science, research, and writing.

Before going into the internship itself, let me tell you a little bit about what led me to this experience. When I first applied, it was early in the spring semester of my first year and I was panicking. Until that year, I didn’t even know what an internship was or why you’d get one. And now I was expected to find one all by myself? Coming from rural public school (well-regarded in my area, but still no prep school) I was a little shell-shocked by the level of career ambition I saw in my peers. But I’m competitive, and I wanted to prove that I too could be ambitious and have a prestigious internship. With no idea what I was interested in, where to start looking for internships, and believing myself not qualified enough anyways, I sent out applications to education nonprofits and summer camps because I already knew those existed and how to apply. Now, education is an awesome path– the problem was that I didn’t have much interest in education at all.

This blog post is about what I gained from my Bad Internship Experience- not about what made my internship so difficult. However, for context, I’ll mention a few of the things that were hardest for me.

There were the cliques, and the bad-mouthing that happened constantly among the two-dozen or so interns. Then there was the lack of organization, training or guidance provided to us before we were thrown in front of classes full of middle schoolers. Finally, there was the working late into the night, constantly picking up extra jobs, while I watched my coworkers get together and have fun. I was sleep deprived and lonely living for the first time by myself in a big city.

But there. That’s it for my complaining. I won’t to go anymore into what about this internship was so hard for me, because I am grateful for what it taught me.

It taught me the perhaps obvious life lesson that jumping into something out of sheer competitiveness isn’t always the best plan of action.

It taught me that, in retrospect, admitting that I didn’t know much about my internship options and asking for help from a faculty member at Scripps would have been perfectly fine (I’ve tried to do this ever since then).

It taught me that while lots of my peers are passionate about education, it’s not for me (hey, after all, I might have had the best summer of my life, and ended up pursuing education as a career).

It taught me that I find working in teams to be a challenge.

It taught me that living alone is hard, and that family and friends are invaluable.

Then there were the things that I liked about my worst summer internship, and what they taught me. For example, I treasured the one-on-one relationships I built with a few of my students who would stay and talk to me about science and life after class, and the biweekly restorative justice circle I led and the sense of peace and connection it brought me. These experiences taught me how powerful individual relationships can be when things are hard.

The following year at Scripps, as I began to explore my internship options for my second summer as a college student, I took all these ideas into account. And as a result, my second summer was the best of my college years…

(To be continued in my next blog)