The summer is almost over and most of us are heading back to our schools or are preparing to start an exciting time abroad. Our summers should have been filled with excitement, fun, friends, pools or beaches, some vacation and of course an internship or a summer job! Let's be real here, unless you have parents that are rich enough to pay all your tuition or you have a full ride, chances are you're broke and the summer is the time where you are expected to both gain work experience and earn money to pay back our lovely student loans. It's our fate. Even though most internships are unpaid, which forces you to intern and then also get a job that pays the bills.
Internships and jobs may not be what you imagined when you applied for them. They may seem great at first but in my experience, a lot of places do not expect you to really complete your work at all or expect you to take five times longer than you actually do. They do not expect you to complete it at a high standard either, even though your college professors expect exactly those things from you during the semesters (if you want a good grade).
After my eight-week internship turned into a bummer, I got a summer job after it was completed. My current job is at a big international company that mainly employs engineers. I work in a department that works with my father's department. They all know my father. They gave me this job because of my father, not because they had a lot of work for me to do. College students at this company get paid really, really well. I earn so much more than what I earn with my Ohio minimum wage jobs during the semesters. In fact, I am earning more than half of what I earned my entire sophomore year of college with a 20 hour work-week every single week. Pretty impressive, right? You would think that, since they are paying us so much, they would give us, the very capable student workers that they chose to employ, tasks to do. However, they underestimate how fast we work. I mean come on guys, college has literally forced us to become highly productive, fast people (even if that means writing a 10 page essay in one night) and we are capable of some pretty incredible stuff and work well under a lot of pressure. Yet, we sit here at our desks either bored to death or doing the work that no one else wants to do. Most of the time, I complete my tasks very quickly and then sit at my desk and do whatever I want to for several hours or stare blankly at my screen until I get the next task, which is mostly the next day. All while I was getting a—pardon my French—shitton of money!
Don't get me wrong, for some people this may sound like a dream come true but really, it gets extremely boring and you feel like no one is expecting you to do anything or perform well. The task I got in the beginning of my job was supposed to last me a week, if not longer. it lasted me 1.5 days. I may or may not be sitting at my desk right now, writing this very article, while getting paid. I can't be the only person out there who is actually seeking valuable work experience at a company or institution that actually expects me complete my work swiftly and to a high standard. A workplace where I am challenged and where I am motivated to do my best.
I applaud summer jobs for giving me money and internships for giving me experience, at least on my resume, but I really wish, in most cases, that they would be better.
