I have been a janitor. There it is, my shameful secret.

And that’s a shame.

The summers before and after freshman year of college, I worked in an elementary school as a janitor. I cleaned lockers, scraped gum off desks and was generally the lowest worker on the totem pole. I was the youngest: My first year there and the youngest by many years.

I don’t tell people this. If they asked, I “worked in a school” doing “whatever I was told to do.” That isn’t wrong, necessarily, but it is a lie by omission. And that’s because I am ashamed of the 40-hour plus weeks I worked, cleaning classrooms so that rich suburban kids could come back in September and trash the place again.

I am not saying that I think everyone should be a janitor, or that we should praise the work as something amazing. We shouldn’t: It was terrible and mind-numbing, and the people…oh, the people. Most of them were bitter old women, who had nothing to look forward to, and 20 years of this work behind them. I hated them, they hated me, and everyone gossiped behind everyone else’s back. I did it to them and I’m sure they did it to me.

But I would like to talk about my shame. Here at Tufts University, internships are key. Some lucky people have theirs locked down in the first semester. My scramble started in January this year, because I knew that I couldn’t repeat another summer of minimum-wage labor. I needed to compete with my friends in finance, public service and research.

That internship search included interviews where I had to talk about past experience, and I think only once did I specify my role in the school district. The interviewer was impressed: She too had worked minimum-wage jobs and appreciated the drain that is menial labor. But usually I glossed over it. People didn’t care. They were much more interested in my “professional” work in a psycholinguistics lab and at Telefund, the fundraising arm of the Alumni department.

I don’t want to make any sweeping conclusions; I don’t think that’s my role. But I do want my readers to think about the people sweeping their floors. In my summers at the school, I could tell which teachers had held minimum wage jobs before. They treated me like a human: A thank you goes a long way when half (or more) of the people you pass ignore you.

I was lucky. I got out of there, I have an amazing education and the name of Tufts University and MIT on my resume. I will never again have to clean up after 100 seventh-graders and I have enough experience on my resume that I don’t even have to mention the janitorial position. And I probably never will.

Because it is my secret and I am ashamed.

And that is a damn shame.