Failure to Intern

Kyle O'Conner wakes up at six in the morning and heads for the train station where he takes the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway to the Chicago Union Station. From the station, he walks a mile heading for State Street where he gets on the 136-bus route and proceeds to his final destination, the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois. His total travel time is 45 minutes. He does this Monday through Saturday, all as a part of his unpaid summer internship. O’Conner’s case is not unusual; for college students, internships are a must if one is looking for a way to get a step above their classmates in the professional world.

According to The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) among the 20,000 graduating seniors taking part in NACE’s 2011 student survey, 52.5 percent reported having taken part in an internship at some point in their college career. Getting an internship sounds like a good idea, but beware: there is a fine line between having a good experience and having a terrible experience. With so many internships available there are bound to be some horror stories. Here are three ways your internship can go wrong.

1. The Internship is Not What You Expected

According to NACE’s student survey nearly 90 percent of students who took part in internships said they would accept an offer of a full-time job from their internship employer. That means that ten percent of the students answered they would not like to work for their current internship employer.

Andy Cheung is part of that ten percent that did not want to work for the company he was interning at. Cheung is from South Carolina and was an engineering major at the time.

“I didn’t like the mundane task of working with Excel,” Cheung said. “There were days when I would be in front of the computer for eight hours.”

Cheung said he enjoyed learning about the manufacturing process and he was lucky enough to have a paid summer internship, but it did have its negative aspects.

“I didn’t want to work for them because I didn’t like the location,” Cheung said. “I know I made an impact while I was there, but it wasn’t the type of impact I wanted.”

Cheung had to watch how the employees worked with manufacturing parts and record the amount of time the employees spent on each manufacturing part. He says the work the interns had to do was boring.

2. The Internship Is Unpaid…and You Hate It

NACE reports that more than half of internships are paid according to their 2011 student survey. For college students like O’Conner that land an un-paid summer internship, the sacrifices can be overwhelming. If an internship is not close to home, students have to pay for rent. Considering the transportation costs and living expenses coupled with no income flowing in, it can be a long summer for the interns. The experience can be draining, especially if you happen to hate your internship.

O’Conner said he wanted to intern at the Shedd Aquarium because it is his favorite Chicago attraction. He explained that it is the second largest aquarium in the nation and that as a child, he wanted to be a marine biologist and work at the aquarium. To his surprise, the internship was not all that he had hoped for.

“I had split duties,” O’Conner said. “I coordinated calls and reservations and I had to meet guests when they arrived at the center. Three days out of the week I was doing market research and the other three days I was dealing with customers.”

The fact that O’Conner had to travel 45 minutes to get to the Shedd Aquarium was just one of the drawbacks of the internship.

“It sucked that it was unpaid,” O’Conner said. “I wish they had covered my transportation. I paid 50 dollars a week just to cover my transportation costs.”

However, that wasn’t his biggest problem. He had to handle customers who were not always friendly.

“The hardest part wasn’t the unpaid aspect, it was dealing with angry customers,” O’Conner said. “The aquarium has a day that gives active members of the military a discount. I know in some places that applies to family members too, but we didn’t do that at the center. When I told a woman [that had a husband in Iraq] she didn’t get a discount, she started screaming at me and her four children were also screaming. The worst part was that she got a crowd of people to chant that I was unpatriotic.”

3. The Internship Is Too Demanding

Another concern that interns have to worry about is being overworked. With paid and unpaid internships, there are laws established to prevent intern exploitation. The Fair Labor Standards Act has a criterion that must be met with when deciding what an unpaid intern can or cannot do. The act states that “the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.”

Jennifer Doyal graduated from Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. She had the opportunity to intern for the United States Environmental Protection Agency in Washington D.C. Although Doyal said her internship was paid, she did have a lot of responsibilities.

“There were only two interns in the climate change division and we had to do a lot,” Doyal said. “I looked over the content of the EPA magazine. I had to make sure the content, size and tone was right before it got published. I also had to deal with 12 other publications that wanted to write for the EPA Magazine. On top of that, the agency made all the interns from all the divisions go to weekly speakers they planned for us.”

Jaclyn Saltzman is a Chicago native majoring in phycology. She is currently doing a teaching assistantship where she works under a professor and helps teach a phycology class. She gets school credit for her work but, like Doyal, she says it is a lot of work.

“I like it because I can see whether I picked the right career path, but I didn’t expect it to be so time consuming,” Saltzman said. “You think that because you are not doing the assignment it won’t be bad, but then you realize I have to grade 240 assignments and do a lesson plan and check attendance. It’s a lot.”

O’Connor says he would go back to work for the Shedd Aquarium, but only if he worked for a different department.

“I would like to focus on the business aspect, maybe finance or marketing. If I were to do it again, though, it would have to be paid.”

When looking for an internship it can be hard to tell if the internship will provide the skills and experience that college students are looking for. If you are worried about your internship going wrong, try to get in contact with past interns and talk about their experience. Look for any excuse to make a visit to the location and do as much research on the company’s employee relationships as possible. Go into an internship with a positive attitude, but be cautious because bad internships do exist.