Brown: Ditch the summer internship

Internship application season is upon us. It’s time to polish up the resume, go to a few mock interviews and start preparing a long list of internships and co-ops to apply for.

As someone who has submitted resumes and applications close to 100 times for various jobs — and has served as an intern — I feel I’m qualified to provide these wise words to some potential applicants. Quit wasting your time and everyone else’s. Give up. Stop what you’re doing and go home for the summer to work as a lifeguard at the pool.

No, I’m not kidding.

You shouldn’t get an internship just because you think you’re supposed to. The internship has evolved into something of a holy grail of outside-the-classroom necessities. As the expression goes, “You can’t get a job without an internship, and you can’t get an internship without a job.”

When most people get their internship acceptance letters, they end up swooning around it in excitement like a prepubescent girl at a Jonas Brothers concert.

But the idea of an internship has become tainted, losing much of its prestige from overexposure.

Last summer, I applied for an internship at a snack foods company. I applied because it paid well and it would have looked nice on my resume. But I would have been miserable with the job. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t get it.

A few months later, I received a letter from SAE International, the organization in charge of standards for the automotive industry, asking if I wanted to intern with them. If there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that the automotive industry is my nicotine. I can identify a car from two blocks away by hearing its exhaust note.

Taking the internship was a no-brainer. The only problem with it was that it was unpaid.

I didn’t let that stop me, though. I worked the internship part-time and worked another job to pay the bills, rarely having too much downtime.

Toward the end of the summer when everyone’s internships wound down, I took a straw poll from a few of my friends to gauge how their internships went. Most hated them. I loved mine, and I opted to work for SAE International for an additional two weeks until the start of this school year.

The difference was in the dedication we had toward our jobs. I did something that made me excited to go to work each day. I worked close to 60 hours and was only paid for roughly 40 of them, but I reveled in the work.

The internship helped verify what I wanted to do with my life, and it gave me a sense of pride in my work.

In saying this, I believe there are only two types of people who should ever apply for internships: people who have a general direction for what they want to do with their lives and people who know what they want to do.

Those who think they know what they want to do are just a few crossroads away from discovering exactly what they want in life. Internships should be used to figure out the details.

People who know what they want to do are just a few steps away from reaching their ambitions. All they need is that “in” to get started in an industry and prove their worth to Mr. Big Shot.

Anyone else is a waste of energy who keeps someone else with direction away from what they want to do. They are the beavers clogging up the dammed lake, so to speak.

Rather than figuring out where they want to go after college and work toward that early on, many students procrastinate until the time when graduation lurks over the horizon. Then they scurry to find internships at the last minute to fill up an otherwise shallow resume.

The late rush to find an internship comes from the misconception of its importance. An internship is a gateway, but it doesn’t dictate anybody into a socioeconomic class for the rest of their life. Like a first job, it’s a starting point.

So if you’re searching for an internship, apply knowing that you want to be there. If the thought of such a position doesn’t give you a sense of nervous-excited butterflies like a first date, you don’t deserve it.

In a 2007 study by the New York-based Conference Board research group, only 39 percent of those 25 years old and younger said they liked their job — the lowest number they had ever recorded in 20 years of surveying.

People aren’t finding jobs right for them. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of searching outside of what a career office at school can provide, but finding something you want to be doing is far more satisfying than taking the first offer and being miserable with it.

But if nothing exists out there that gets you giddy, stay home and work a landscaping job for the summer. There’s nothing to be ashamed of by not having an internship. And if you’re ultimately happy with what you’re doing, does anything else really matter?

E-mail Jacob at JEB110@pitt.edu.