workingfortheman.com

Copy-maker, gopher, secretary, messenger, lunch-coordinator - today's intern wears many important hats in the business world. Going against the capitalist principle of a day's pay for a day's work, the internship is a questionable and exploitative component of the modern work force. Unlike its medieval forefather, the apprenticeship, in which a young man indentured himself to a master to learn a skilled trade and eventually inherit the position, internships exist in corporations and organizations, where the only skill learned is the art of ass-kissing, back-stabbing, and name-dropping. The unspoken agreement between employer and intern is this: you pay your dues and do your time, and in return you receive a fill-in-the-blank recommendation from one of the top dogs who never even learned your name: During his/her appointment at Dewey, Screwum & Howe, [Your Name Here] performed his/her assigned duties with intelligence, maturity, and skill. Your time is up, you are handed your gilded letter of approval, given a cupcake, and scooted out the door.

Many internships are geared towards college kids looking for a true-life work experience to beef up their resume and give them a taste of the real world. For a few months, they get to play dress-up in suits and heels, sit in on "important" meetings, and run errands for the bigwigs. As soon as the novelty of work wears off, they get to pack up and go back to acting their age. However, many companies are insisting that eligible entry-level applicants first complete internships to give them experience and the requisite skills needed for the job, even though most entry-level work is elementary and administrative. In the business world, you must attend pre-school before you are allowed to enter kindergarten. Most companies are headquartered in large cities, such as New York or San Francisco, where living expenses are beyond the means even of those who take home a paycheck, much less those who work for free. Only those with alternate means of subsistence, i.e. Mommy and Daddy, can afford to work without pay.

Internships are essentially a luxury for the inherently wealthy. The crux of the intern experience is this: not only are you not compensated for your contribution to the company, but you are also low-man on the totem pole and are treated as such. Expect appreciation and endless thank-yous for your dedicated and unpaid work? Forget it. During my first few months as an intern at Good Samaritan Books, almost no one addressed me by my name.

I suspect that few of the twenty employees could distinguish me from the parade of young faces marching through the internship program. Interns come and go with such frequency that they are regarded as itinerant labor. The words "please," "excuse me," and "thank you" were markedly absent from the daily vocabulary of the office. Assignments were thrust at me, despite my involvement in other projects, accompanied by blunt instructions and none of the aforementioned courtesy words. Each task was presented to me as a gift, an opportunity to learn. If I perused the manuscript as I fed it into the copy machine, I would learn about the editorial process; by licking envelopes and addressing letters, I would discover the names and companies of the must-knows in the business. This was the extent of the training I received during my publishing apprenticeship.

My first day as an intern, I was told that the most important task I was to perform would be answering phones, "our fundamental link to the outside world." Having never worked with a switchboard before, I was immediately overwhelmed by all the blinking lines, cacophonous beeps and rings, Hold, Transfer, Conference... As a result, many people were disconnected, names were forgotten in the transfer process, incomplete messages were taken. For these beginner's mistakes, I was scolded almost daily - a humiliation I have not suffered since Junior High. I was often confronted with: This person is VERY IMPORTANT! You have to come find me if I don't pick up! or, conversely, This person is not important AT ALL! Do not transfer him to me! My personal favorite was: Did my nanny say it was urgent? You have to write that down! I had previously worked doing research for the Justice Department, translating in federal courtrooms, and counseling victims of domestic violence, and now I was being reprimanded for taking incomplete messages from nannies. And I wasn't getting paid for it. I seemed to have taken a misstep in my career path.

One day my fellow intern, a creative and highly intelligent young woman, was instructed by the most notoriously intern-abusing editor to count the number of words in a 416-page manuscript. "Don't read it," she was told, "just count."

Most word-processing programs will perform word counts in a matter of seconds, yet my bright colleague spent hours computing the characters as she was instructed and giving herself a massive headache in the process. The fact is that most responsibilities assigned to interns can be completed by machines. So as interns in today's business world, we are learning no trade, acquiring no skills; we are merely cheap human stand-ins for costly technology. Now that's American ingenuity for you.

Benna is looking forward to the day when she gets to supervise some interns.

Back to the archives.

Return to the main page.