find work I'm passionate about

Time for another episode of “Find Stacey profitable summer and fall internships to boost her resume and bank account”. Woooo! I LOVE this game! Just wish I were better at playing it!

Maybe I’ll apply for a State Department internship for next fall.

...I might be getting paid again for my internship??

Apparently after I whined to the intern supervisor and sent her my timesheet a month ago, she realized a month later that I still hadn’t gotten paid at all, and talked to the woman who writes paychecks, and supposedly I’m getting a check on Friday. No idea how much it’s gonna be for. Probably be like ”$5, thanks for your time!”. But a check’s a check. Money’s good. Every little bit helps, especially when I’m trying to save up as much as possible for next semester.

Why didn’t I quit this internship when I found out I wasn’t getting paid? WHY? That’s the whole damn reason I wanted a job this semester in the first place. Why?
Now I’m stuck doing menial bitchwork, which is of absolutely no interest to me, not getting paid for it, feeling generally unliked and unappreciated in my department, feeling unproductive in general, and continually stressing out about it. And NOT GETTING PAID. There was a week when I apparently hit the number of hours needed to get paid, and I was promised payment for that week, but have I gotten that payment? Give you a hint: It rhymes with “blow” and is not “yes”.

I know why I didn’t quit – because my department is understaffed as it is, and my quitting would be a pain in their asses that they neither need nor really did anything in particular to deserve. They’re really not the ones that screwed me over or failed to mention the whole minimum time committment for payment thing. The things I do, menial and bitchwork-ish as they are, are important for the department and they’re needed and all, and it would be wicked tough for them to find somebody else now.

But still. I’m not interested in anything that I’m doing – I mean, who really loves entering checks and filing? Important stuff, yes, but crappy work. I feel like they (my department) are constantly comparing me to the intern they had over the summer, who apparently kicked ass. Well, she was probably full time, and probably NOT taking 17 credit hours and doing extra curriculars at the same time as the damn internship, so of course she’s gonna be better than I am. I’m sure she’s a wonderful gal and all, I never really met her, only talked to her on the phone once, and all the notes she left me have been wonderful, but still – that’s just more stress for me. Ok, so I don’t stack up to the full-time summer intern you had. Deal with it. I’m doing my best, and not getting paid for it, so cut me some slack. And if you don’t give me anything to do for a couple days then suddenly throw a truckload of filing and research at me, then you really shouldn’t be surprised if I’m not overwhelmingly excited about it or if I don’t get it done in a day.

Grr. Not happy.

Today my friend Robyn said she’d ask around in the office she works (she works, among other places, in the President’s office at school), and see if anybody needed a part-time assistant or intern or something. She makes halfway decent money – $10/hour, I think, which is a hell of alot more than I’m making now. Maybe I could cut down the unpaid bitchwork to one day a week or something, so I’d still be helping out and doing some stuff, but using my other days more wisely and EARNING MONEY.

If nothing else, I am gonna work a few days at the bookstore at home over Thanksgiving, and for a good bit of winter break, so I’ll earn a tiny bit of money. (although it won’t be anything near what I wanted to earn to take abroad).

Sigh.

Grr. Ok, so I’m not getting paid when I thought I was. Basically, I’m short of the minimum hours to get paid by about 8 on my “normal” week, and even working as much as I possibly could during the business week without skipping classes, I’m still about 4 hours short. I talked to my dad and he said not to worry about it, to file this under the “lessons learned” category in the back of my brain and accept that I’ve been duped, and just keep going for the experience and all that jazz. So, I’m trying not to stress about it, although I’m still not happy that I’m not getting paid, unpaid internships are either for students with no experience, which I have, or for organizations with no money, and believe me, CAP has money. I’m not even doing anything substantive or related to my major either – I’m a strategic planning intern, which means I enter checks, I file things, I email people, I mail things – all necessary for the Center, I understand, but mindless and not really helping me much in the long run. Whatever.

I do like the other interns there, there’s probably about 20 of us and we spend a good portion of our days bs’ing and emailing each other when we should be working. We plan “intern bonding” activities, which usually revolve around food or a bar. The only problem with that is I’m pretty sure I’m the youngest intern (they accept all levels of students as interns, so alot of them are grad students or seniors), and I’m not legal yet. Grr. I had company in my illegalness, but my fellow minor is currently in Brazil and won’t be back at CAP till December. So whenever they plan a bar night I’m out of the bonding circle. At their last happy hour night, one of the girls won a reduced-price Happy Hour night for all her friends, or something like that, so all the current intern bonding talk revolves around cheap alcohol at the CAP intern happy hour night. I don’t even bother trying to deny my illegalness, I joke about it and it becomes a joke, then I suggest dinner and dinner gets planned for the vague future. Damn not being 21.

Random thought…sometime this semester I’d like to write something for Campus Progress, which is done by CAP. They accept student publications, not just from interns. That would be going towards my “Get something published…” goal.

So I found out today that I might not actually be getting paid for what I had thought was a paid internship. According to one of the other interns, you only get paid if you work a certain number of hours…he’s not getting paid, and I’m working the same number of hours as he is.

Bitches.

More on this later. I need to consult with some people on Monday, and either confirm or disprove this. Hopefully it shall be disproven. Otherwise…there may be an angry rant in store.

For anyone who’s in DC tomorrow

For any and all students out there;

For everybody and their mother

And just for the hell of it.

enjoy.

I have so many interests that I want to combine into a career…I love learning languages, anthropology (mostly sociocultural anthropology), international affairs and global politics, peace studies, Asian philosophy, really good literature…plus I like working with kids and I really want a job that I can help people in. My ultimate dream job would be US ambassador to Vatican City, but I think after graduation I’ll try to get a job in a nonprofit somewhere around here.