toss intern

i passed my internship! oh happy day, thank goodness it’s over. what a miserable experience it’s been, at least the BSU side of things…they basically made it as unbearably difficult to get started as possible, with more handouts and paperwork and hoops to jump through than could possibly be necessary. i have to assume all the bureaucracy was an intentional challenge, because if i don’t assume that i will choke to death on the inefficiency.

the internship coordinator guy seemed not so great—i guess i only really talked to him once, and that wasn’t fun. he comes off as kind of a jerk in all his writing, like all the assignment sheets and emails and things, but sometimes people have sort of a nasty personality in their writing and then turn out to be perfectly nice in person. i’ll never know for sure because i’m certainly never taking one of his classes.

one of the things that got under my skin was his severe and emphatic insistence that we CANNOT make ANY errors in any written materials we turn in to him. then of course he throws in a peppering of typos, grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors and whathaveyou in his own written materials. i found at least one mistake in every mass email he sent. (example: “I will send you supervisor an email with the details and the link (which is different than the one above in item 2).”) …so how about not being a hypocrite? everyone makes mistakes. perfection is a fine goal but there’s no need to be all feisty about it…doing so is just going to make people like me search for and expose your errors retributively.

i filled out my post-internship survey last week, with plenty of suggestions for improvement. it was silly, i actually started crying as i was filling out the survey. it felt so good to get all that crap off my chest and feel some hope that what i wrote might affect change before any other students have to go through the experience. but who knows, it might just be ignored. at least i got the catharsis.