This summer I decided to apply for an internship in Texas. While this internship was completely out of my realm of knowledge, I was excited for something new, something refreshing. I could not wait for this experience. I spent months anticipating and getting extremely anxious about my internship. Little did I know, I was fantasizing and romanticizing the entire thing. Building it all up in my head to be far greater than it actually is. Not to say it isn’t a great experience because it is, but it is definitely not as glamorous as I had dreamt it would be. I thought it would always be a riveting experience, full of coffee (which I don’t even like), cute outfits and lunches with all these new people I would meet. I imagined my own desk, headset, and projects that were significant and challenging.
I could not wait to go out and buy business casual attire. I could not wait to wear it. That too turned out much different than I expected. I could not wait to meet new people and make new friends in a new city, where I knew no one but my dad. (It’s week three and I have no friends and there are no other interns or people close to my age on my floor.) Instead, I actually eat lunch alone most days. I imagined having so many things to write about and learning things that would change my perspective. While I definitely have learned a lot (especially about Microsoft Excel and that people can be very picky), it is not in the areas I expected.
Truth versus reality revealed.
1. In actuality, my day is quite monotonous and rarely am I assigned tasks that are intriguing.
2. Business casual clothing actually gets really old really quickly. It’s also very boring, restricting and uncomfortable. And there are so many rules for it, it cannot be too tight, too loose, too revealing or too short. Or cute apparently…
3. It’s also not glamorous, and heels and flats give you a lot of blisters. Birks are unacceptable (I have thought about trying, though.)
4. You’re not going to magically like coffee, but you will probably try just to seem more adult-like and to help you stay awake. Caffeine is everything.
5. I have never appreciated snacks more.
6. If you’re not a morning person, then walking up at 6 a.m. is still going to suck. Even if you like going to work, it still sucks sometimes (pretty much every day).
7. You will probably feel really dumb a lot of the time and have no idea what everyone else is talking about most of the time. But you should try to follow along anyway and keep up.
8. Spreadsheets are not as exciting as they sound. Even if you love organizing things, doing it for hours on end might make you hate it.
9. Don’t ever ask four people if they have anything for you to do because you will then be swamped.
10. Ask questions, but not too many because then people will go off on tangents for 20 years.
11. You’re not going to love every minute of what you’re doing. In fact, you might hate every minute of it every once in a while (hopefully not every day).
12. You will definitely experience "FOMO" (fear of missing out) when seeing all your friends back home having fun or sitting at the beach.
13. Sitting for eight hours is really hard and surprisingly really tiring.
14. It’s really hard to make yourself go to the gym after work. Staring at a computer screen for eight hours really makes your motivation dwindle.
15. The 5 p.m. traffic is so real and so slow.
So, the summer I thought would be full of adventures has actually been extremely tedious, but full of information (even though I don’t retain all of it). The summer I thought I always longed for, where I would be acknowledged and treated like an adult, has made me realize how much I don’t want to grow up. Sometimes I wish we could all grow back down, to when we weren’t held accountable for so many things. To when a full-time job seemed glamorous and stimulating as opposed to tiring and tedious.
