Intern.

If ever there was a word associated with suffering, intern is it.

Interns get no respect. Not that they’ve earned all that much, but all too often, they are treated like chattel. Interns have even had been auctioned off on eBay.

But this is not to say that an internship can’t be a benefit for both the intern and the mentor.

It has been a few years since my intern days as a young field biologist, but let’s just say that my months collecting data for other people’s research projects taught me a great deal about life and two important corollaries to Murphy’s Law:

• Nothing is so bad that it cannot get worse, and

• There is no limit to how bad things can get.

I won’t go into the details, but I learned to problem-solve my way out of situations that included the following obstacles: pelican vomit, bicycle handlebars that occasionally detached at speed, rotting sea turtle eggs, the four worst employees in the entire Costa Rican national park system, clueless and sunburned tourists and bird-eating spiders. Yes. Bird. Eating. Spiders.

Fellow Eat Media Content Editor Wendy Biddlecombe also had some memorable experiences as an intern:

• Trade Magazine, New York City: Ridiculed by conservative, old New York executives for wearing fedoras and a Hillary Clinton campaign button. Said New York executives tried to turn me into a cigar smoker. This is the only internship that gave me a stipend. That stipend was well spent when the company fired their senior editor during her maternity leave, promoted the junior editor and assumed that I could pick up the slack. Plus side: I know more about tea, coffee and cigars than anyone else I know.

• Book publisher, New York City: After a semester spent as an editorial assistant with a killer midtown view from my personal office, I interned with the company again after a semester in India, only to find that the office has been filled and the only desk available to me was in the window-less mailroom. I spent the semester looking for little pleasures, like snooping through high profile writer contracts and returning new releases to Barnes and Noble for store credit. In my defense, it was only to afford books for school.

All that said, internships are highly sought positions, even by those who are already earning the big bucks.

Why? Because they not only offer a glimpse at what it’s really like to ply a trade but you might even pick up some of the tricks of the trade along the way, depending on the quality of your mentor. Also, depending on how much independence you are given, you may get to learn a lot about self-reliance and problem-solving in a non-academic setting. No more theory. Time for some practical skills.

Sure, you probably won’t be paid much, if at all, and you will likely be asked complete some hideous, mind-numbing task of the sort that goes along with the phrase, “We’ll get the intern to do it.” But even these tasks can have hidden Easter Eggs within them; you just have to be willing to strive for the Zen state of Samadhi—total oneness with the moment—and don’t mess up the Starbucks order.

— Jonathan

Photo by dsb_nola

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Content, Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.