internship hell

part one of all 2 interesting things that happened while I was gone

Otters!

I’m going to try my best to do 2 posts a week moving forward, or at least for the next few weeks. Hopefully that will get me writing more consistently.

Last we spoke it was just post-Super Bowl Sunday, which feels like a lifetime ago now. Two things happened that I want to ramble about and you will one of those things today in this post and then the other thing later in the week (if I had to guess it would probably arrive in your inboxes on Friday.)

You may have heard about this story if you follow my Twitter but it’s too frustrating to not not share with the wider Internet.

Maybe you’re like me and you’re young and restless and therefore in the thick of summer internship applications right now. Go you! Best of luck, Otters, wherever you want to end up.

I have no idea if I’ve already mentioned this to y’all in a post post, and I’m too lazy to scroll all the way back through the archive and check, but I went through the process for the first time last summer. So this isn’t my first rodeo. Unfortunately.

It went good, I guess, this rookie season. I had a couple of interviews and one offer from a childcare company, which I nearly accepted but had to turn down. I had decided to enrol in summer classes (not fun) and I couldn’t necessarily back out from that commitment (also not fun) so wanted to scale it back to a little bit under full-time hours but they wouldn’t comply.

So I ended up taking a part-time position with the Office of the VP and Dean here at UofT. It was a job I really enjoyed with a boss who still keeps in touch with me and (most importantly) finds me hilarious and even replies to my Instagram stories every once in a while.

So maybe it wasn’t the exact W I had aimed for at the start of application season last January or December or whatever, but it was a W! And I guess it kind of taught me that sometimes we have to adjust our goals a little bit. Or the universe happens to adjust those goals for us.

As for this year! I have applied to maybe 50 or 60 different places at this point, which…no idea if that’s too much or too little, but it is something, goddamnit. And I have no idea if I’ll land anything or if I’ll chicken out and front-load on summer classes again.

As of writing, nothing good has transpired. Most places have ghosted me. Some have also sent rejection letters. “End this poor girl’s suffering,” they must’ve been saying.

One company which shall not be named (because I want them to hire me next year LOL) had internship applications due on January 31st. So, naturally, I applied on January 31st at 11:56 PM.

A few weeks later I checked their website and as you can see above, they said they would get back to everyone that applied by February 18. So I waited patiently like a normal person.

Then February 18th came and went. And I had heard NOTHING.

And by this point I had already grown so accustomed to getting ghosted by everybody I had every applied to, so it wasn’t like I was crushed, right?

But then I checked their website just to be sure, since that was where they had said that they were going to get back to everybody by the 18th. And wouldn’t you know it:

Your eyes are not failing you. That date has CHANGED, bro. THERE WAS HOPE!!!!

And by the way, most places don’t tell you when they’ll get back to you. “After the deadline,” they’ll say, or “in 3 weeks”. Sometimes they don’t follow up on that promise at all.

Or, most commonly, they only apply to people on their shortlist, people they want to interview.

But the way I thought after I saw this changed date was that I still had a shot. I was still in the game, goddamnit.

But then February 19 happened and I again heard nothing.

I check their website again the next day (February 20, keep up losers) AND LOOK WHAT IT SAID.

So now it wasn’t just an extra day of waiting. It was TWO extra days of waiting.

This was getting excruciating. Now that I had known that they were going to get back to me (get back to everyone, for that matter) all I wanted was to see that response. That direct confirmation that I sucked and had to apply to 243857 more places (which I already knew, but whatever).

But then when I was trying to look on the bright side, I got really excited.

Maybe, I thought, MAYBE I am just THAT brilliant and THAT amazing that these Human Resources people needed TWO EXTRA DAYS to discuss just how TRULY wonderful I was and FIGHT for my INCREDIBLY DESERVED opportunity to TAKE PART IN THIS GODDAMNED INTERNSHIP PROGRAM.

So I went on with my life, delusional as ever. I binged The First 48 and watched the pilot of the new Law & Order series that’s set in Toronto. (So bad it’s good.)

But then I woke up on February 24th and there was nothing in my inbox.

Well, ok. Nothing from them. My profs have sure as hell been emailing me nonstop with all this “read this!!!!!” and “WRITE YOUR GODDAMN ESSAY” stuff.

But why wasn’t this company emailing me? Hadn’t they just spent two extra days flipping the hell out over how incredible I was?!

So I checked the website again. And the date…hadn’t…changed.

Ether they had lost all sense of time or I was not going to be a part of this program.

Two days later (the 26th, aka yesterday) I got this.

Man! This still stings to read, and I’ve read it, what, a billion times?

I have no idea if they were genuinely moved by my vision of “a more equitable and sustainable world,” as they put it, or if they said that to literally everyone who applied. You be the judge in the comments:

That’s it. That’s the saga. Hopefully that ruins your week almost as much as it ruined mine.

Imagine if every internship program did this date-switching thing. I think that I would die, as Courtney Love once said.

Long live this hellscape of a job market,

🦦 — O — 🦦