summer internship season is upon us

by Alison Green on July 29, 2024

With summer internship season in full swing, your workplace may be experiencing an influx of young people who don’t quite know how work works yet.

This is often delightful! Interns can bring new ideas, fresh energy, and an ability to explain what brat summer is.

But part of hosting interns is accepting that they often don’t know workplace norms yet; after all, part of the point of an internship is to learn how offices operate. Unfortunately for their colleagues — or fortunately, depending on your perspective — that learning process can range from mundane to comical to downright bizarre.

At Slate today, I wrote about the funny things interns sometimes do. You can read it here.

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{ 165 comments }

{ 165 comments… read them below }

  1. Heather*

    I don’t know how true it is but a friend reported to me that she had an intern that thought she didn’t have to show up at all.
    The intern was somehow under the impression (after the application, two interviews, and a tour of the office) that she was going to get credit for the internship without ever actually coming in again or doing any work.

    1. LCH*

      i really want to hear from the other side for some of these. like… how and why? i also want to know what’s going on with outdoor laptop girl now. did she end up as a park ranger or something? i hope so!

      1. A. N. Other*

        If I had to speculate, perhaps she regarded the position as essentially voluntary. I used to volunteer somewhere and the tacit understanding was that, as I wasn’t paid, I didn’t *have* to come in at all—the only expectation was that I should be considerate enough to let them know at some point that morning.

        People should be compensated for their time; if employers aren’t willing to do so then they can’t reasonably expect young people at the start of their working lives to arrive on the dot.

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        “What if I see something that inspires me?” I mean, I think I’d punch out of the conversation right there…

    2. Apex Mountain*

      Had she been watching the Sopranos and thought this was one of those no-show no-work jobs at the construction site?

    3. Marieke*

      can someone explain to this ignorant Dutch woman what a summer internship IS? We have internships but they are during the schoolyear because they are part of your curriculum. And in summer students work cor money and travel for fun and in offices very little happens as it is summer. I am so curious to what this looks like! I must admit I thought someone made it up when I first heard of this

      1. Hlao-roo*

        In the US, a summer internship is usually an office job that lasts for 10-12 weeks and is gearing to current students. Typically the tasks are entry-level, and may include undesirable “busy-work” like making copies and filing paper. Some summer internships are paid, some are not paid (un-paid internships have to meet certain standards that the intern is learning something/benefits from the internship).

        Office work in the US generally slows down a little bit in the summer (a lot of people take 1-week vacations in the summer) but it doesn’t slow down as much as in other countries where employees have more vacation time and generally take 2+ weeks off in a row during the summer.

          1. Chocolate Teapot*

            When I was younger (late teens) we had Work Experience at school, in which we would spend a fortnight in a company, often as a junior office junior or person making the tea.

            Internships were not really a thing until I was at university, and even then it was something only rich well-connected students could afford to do. Even the word intern/internship wasn’t very common back then, although there was the French term “Stagiaire” or summer student worker, i.e. simple tasks for a nominal wage.

            1. londonedit*

              I’m in the UK and had a similar experience – in Year 10 (age 15) we did two weeks of work experience, where you’d go and work somewhere with the idea of generally seeing what the working world was about. Of course being 15 we couldn’t actually do much work because of legal/health & safety restrictions, so it was mainly work shadowing or doing the photocopying etc.

              When I was at university, internships were really only for people doing degrees with immediate pathways into something corporate, like banking, or maybe law or medicine or something like that. They weren’t a thing we could really do as English students. In publishing work experience is still a fairly big deal, but it’s more difficult nowadays because a lot of the small publishing houses have been eaten up by huge publishing companies so there’s less opportunity for work experience placements. At any rate a work experience placement would usually only be 2-3 weeks, and there’s no formal programme to manage them – you’ll have your travel costs paid but that’s about it.

              1. Monster Munch*

                I’m in the UK too, in chemistry – I did two internships (you could call them studentships) as an undergrad, not part of my curriculum or advertised positions, but positions I sought out by basically asking around till someone said yes.
                And my current big company takes on interns, though most often they just get called students, and while they don’t have responsibilities as such, they do have real work to do.

          2. Carol the happy*

            It’s also to get general scutwork done. One intern had to take pages and pages of internal notes, coordinate them and go to several dozen different programs and work orders to see which had been done and when. Bored out of his Gourd, he was!
            Another intern came on when a tornado had blown out the windows on one side of a 10-story building- so he got to vacuum and move office furniture for 2 weeks. Then move it back when the fresh paint dried. He did get 2nd level intern pay, and was very
            well- regarded, so we saw him the next year- when the AC unit on the roof leaked down 3 upper floors (grim jokes about being below c-level!) and into the stairwell and elevator shaft. That year, he was put in charge of the interns who- you guessed it- moved office furniture out, watched paint dry, then moved it back….
            Interns are another category of worker- it’s supposed to be mutually beneficial, but it’s really more likely a skeet shoot on a roller coaster.

      2. Great Frogs of Literature*

        US offices may have a bit of a summer slowdown, but not nearly as much as I understand many European offices do.

        A summer internship is work experience that happens during the summer, rather than the school year. It can still provide credit towards an academic degree, though it doesn’t have to. (I had one that was work experience unrelated to my major.) I think legally they’re supposed to either be paid or provide course credit, but most people (employers and interns) don’t really understand the rules, and interns are famously underpaid/not paid. (Though obviously that isn’t true in all fields/at all employers.)

      3. Clisby*

        There may be internships like that in the US, but at least in tech fields, I’ve never heard of any that were part of a curriculum. My daughter had 2 summer internships with Boeing – she was a computer science major – but the internship had nothing to do with the curriculum. For some companies, summer internships are to get an idea of who they’d like to recruit after college.

        The closest thing I can think of to what you’re describing is student teaching – students majoring in education have to spend a semester? whole year? Working in a local school under the supervision of an experienced teacher. Unlike with my daughter’s internships, the student teaching didn’t pay anything; it was just part of their training.

      4. Lizcase*

        where I am in Canada, we call them Co-ops, and they are part of the curriculum and paid. My university had 3 terms rather than 2 semesters, and I alternated 4 months school, 4 months work. It’s a bit more expensive tuition, and takes and extra year, but as someone paying my own way, having the co-op jobs helped immensely. My last co-op job turned into full-time after graduating so it worked out great.

        I find the idea of unpaid interns to be odd.

        1. Anon For This*

          Yeah another Co-op (Cooperative Education) grad here. It’s particular universities that specialize in it – UVic and Waterloo are ones I have had experience with. I had four semesters of paid work experience in my field over a five year degree, which included resumes, interviews, and a written report and presentation after the work term; the university found the positions, and checked to make sure we were doing real work, not just photocopying and cleaning. Companies paid a salary that was equal to or better than typical summer jobs, and covered transportation to and from the work location, if it was in another city.

          Having the work terms during the year helped in finding employers, as it didn’t concentrate all internships in the summer term.

          I work at a university abroad, and we have a two month summer student program where we have students come in and work on a research project with a faculty or post-doc. There are a series of field-related lectures, and we pay a stipend that covers living expenses.

        2. londonedit*

          Some of our (UK/England) degrees have a work placement year – in England undergraduate degrees are typically three years, but for some degree subjects you can do a four-year degree where the third year is a paid work placement. You can also do work/study courses which sound like the co-op arrangement you mention – usually those will involve studying for a degree or a foundation diploma over a longer period of time, alternating periods of paid work with periods of classroom-based study.

    4. Artemesia*

      A friend of mine had a very well designed internship program (she was the faculty director). Students met in seminars to integrate their work with their studies once a week and there were projects designed to consolidate learning and they reported on their activities in a reflective journal.

      She ran into the person the student was interning for at a community meeting and commented on how impressed she was with the work she was hearing about. the supervisor told her, he had never shown up. He wasn’t just slacking; he was doing zip all and fabricating everything.

      Given the processes they had in place, he would have been uncovered eventually — probably, but he made impressive progress doing nothing.

  2. Medium Sized Manager*

    The PC vs. laptop intern could easily be any one of my (adult, seasoned) coworkers. The idea of using anything other than a Mac laptop is met with equal parts disgust and terror.

    1. I strive to Excel*

      I transitioned from using my beloved Mac laptop to a PC only because the college classes and later work projects I had used software that is not remotely supported on a Mac. I still can’t stand the Windows IOS. I know how to use it in self-defense, but ye gods and little fishes, if I ever get a job that is Mac-heavy I will ritually dance over the grave of my Windows machine. I doubt it will ever happen. But I can dream.

      1. Medium Sized Manager*

        It seems less and less common (and probably for good reason), so I am enjoying the Mac while it lasts. I suspect they’ll be pulled out of rotation in the next year or two though.

      2. No Longer Looking*

        Quick FYI: Windows and i are Operating Systems (OS). iOS is to Mac as Windows OS is to PC, so saying “Windows iOS” is as odd as saying “Macintosh Win Key”. We’ll figure out that they mean WinOS or Command Key, but it doesn’t reflect well on the speaker.

        (I know there’s 80% that it was just a typo, just felt compelled to leave the note for anyone else who might have been confused and started calling it WinIOS).

        1. Orv*

          Okay, to get really pedantic about it, the OS on Apple laptops and computers is macOS. iOS runs on iPhones and iPads, but not full-sized devices.

          1. MBK*

            Except now even iOS and iPadOS are two different things (that share a tremendous amount of code). Then there’s watchOS and tvOS, and there are rumors of homeOS becoming its own thing – possibly as an expansion and rebranding of tvOS.

          1. Great Frogs of Literature*

            I figured it spoke to the strength of your preference for Apple devices…

      3. Back in Black*

        I feel the same only in reverse. The year and a half that my work made me use an iMac were the worst of my career. I hated every second of trying to use that bloody-minded POS machine. Nothing about that system made any sense.

        The day I was offered the chance to swap it for a PC, I bought cocktails and cake to celebrate.

        1. allathian*

          It’s been decades since I used a Mac. I’m generally flexible with equipment and software, but I absolutely loathed the one-button mouse. Being unable to right-click made me ragey.

          This was when I was at college, so I used one of those Macintosh Classic II computers with the tiny integrated monochrome monitor. That was the student union, while the college used Windows PCs. We had email, but I don’t remember being able to send useful attachments, at least not in my first two years. The sneakernet ruled, and I hated having to carry both Mac and Windows formatted floppies. And of course, if you started a project in either one, switching was not fun. I was glad to have a computer at home, but I didn’t get a modem until I was ready to start writing my Master’s thesis, so if I had to type something that required any research, I had to go to the library.

        2. Alice*

          Same here, but with my work iPhone. I wanted to pitch it out a window on a semi-regular basis. I did use my brother’s Mac laptop once and had a similarly frustrating experience. Thankfully I have never seen anything but Windows at work and my current job asked me which type of phone I wanted.

    2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      I mean, this is most of the techies I know? Being able to WFH even occasionally requires a laptop, and for many programmers etc. using a Mac is a deal-breaker. If you’re just doing email and Excel it wouldn’t matter but it does to many people.

      1. Medium Sized Manager*

        I’m experiencing the opposite: they have a Mac and would be incredibly dramatic about using a PC.

        1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

          That was my spouse for fifteen years – swearing he would never have an Apple device in the house – until his current job mandated Mac. Now he curses Windows and Office at every opportunity, and has bought our teenager a Mac.

        3. SemiAnon*

          Macs tend to be popular in fields where work is fundamentally Linux/Unix based – with the Mac, you get commercial software, plus a Unix-like command line interface and all the software that goes with it. Using Windows for work would be incredibly frustrating – if I didn’t have a Mac, I would use a Linux machine and dual boot Windows or use Wine for things like commercial word processors / presentation software.

          1. allathian*

            This is so interesting! I’m old enough to have started using computers with Windows 3/MS-DOS 5 (later upgraded to Win 3.1 and DOS 6). My proudest achievement in anything approaching coding was to set up a dual-bootup system with DOS and Windows so that I could use a particular type of memory for an older DOS game that I loved and that required the memory that wasn’t compatible with Windows (EXT or EXP, can’t remember which). My first computer was a 25 MHz 386 with 4 MB RAM (soon upgraded to 8 MB) and a 40 MB hard drive, for reference. At the time, the upgraded system cost the equivalent of approx. USD 3,900 in today’s money and I got it as a high school graduation present.

            I think it’s rather ironic that the computer that was originally hailed for having a user-friendly GUI is today often used for its Unix-compatible CLI!

      2. Masked*

        Huh. My spouse’s biotech employer, very much on the tech end of biotech, is almost entirely Mac. Apparently they’re better for lots of advanced chemistry design and research tasks.

        1. Orv*

          I work in a college Math department and they use Macs. A lot of important mathematical software was originally written for UNIX systems, and porting it to Macs is easier than porting it to Windows.

        2. Monster Munch*

          *side eye* to this claim, though it may be a very different area of chemistry to mine I guess

          1. JustaTech*

            There’s a bunch of bio software that runs best (or used to be, only ran) on a Mac.
            Back ~2008-ish running FloJo on a Windows machine would take like 20 minutes to process a single set of data – like, oh no, you clicked the wrong button, go get a cup of tea, where on the Mac it was “click, done”.

            In my experience very technical software tends to be either Windows or Mac, but rarely both (and almost never has a decent UI).

      3. Orv*

        My experience is IT workers who work with Linux and UNIX systems tend to prefer Mac laptops because of the easy access to a UNIX-type command line. The Windows command line is totally different.

      4. I hate being old*

        All the devs I know are Linux or Mac people. They’ll walk away from a Windows only job.

    3. Momma Bear*

      And then there’s me who likes my PC with multiple large screens and refuses to allow IT to take the tower and give me a laptop. I like my setup and it works just fine.

      1. Good Lord Ratty*

        I have a work laptop and multiple monitors. You know you can just connect them to your laptop using a docking station or an HDMI cable, right? Anyway, that’s how pretty much every computer at my workplace is: a laptop computer connected to one or more monitors from a docking station. Though I do have one coworker who doesn’t use the monitors, which is weird to me because we’re all given two big monitors due to the large number of applications we have to have open at any given time. But that’s his choice I guess.

        1. Angstrom*

          True, but depending on the monitors and the application(s) the laptop video card may not be capable of getting the best out of multiple large monitors. A tower has room for higher performance video cards.

          1. Good Lord Ratty*

            I suppose it depends on the type of work you’re doing. If you’re in graphic design, animation, videography, or something else graphics-intensive, then fine. But does that really apply to the majority of people in office jobs?

            1. Project Maniac-ger*

              I wasn’t an intern, but about a month into my first full time job out of college my colleague had to have emergency surgery and was out for an undetermined amount of time. (ulcer from… stress.) I took over her work, one task of which was to put on a recognition event for 300 people. It actually went really well for what was in hindsight a bananapants situation, BUT I accidentally sorted the check-in list alphabetically by first name, just as the library intern in the article did. My coworkers complained. It was brought up at my yearly performance review. I seriously thought about no call no showing because it was such a Big Deal.

              I have never committed such an atrocity again. I’ve also moved on to jobs with much better culture.

  3. H.Regalis*

    Years ago I had to help interview interns for a grant-funded project I worked on. We interviewed two guys for one position. The first guy would not look at or speak to me at all and when I asked any questions, he would address my male boss when answering. Did not hire him partially for that, and partially because he had the personality of a wet cardboard box.

    Another guy for the same project but a different internship was just awesome. He works in one of the project fields now. I see him in the news sometimes for the work he’s doing.

    2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      “personality of a wet cardboard box” has me dying. It’s on the level of, “useless as a white crayon,” which I saw on a list of creative insults.

      1. UnCivilServant*

        “useless as a white crayon,”

        Somebody didn’t have the joy of using multicolored construction paper in pre-school

    3. Ultimate Facepalm*

      Worked with a guy like that. He would ignore my questions. I would look at my 3rd cowrker, Kevin, and say, Kevin, please ask Dave about X. Dave was standing right there – 2 feet from us. Kevin would ask Dave, Dave would answer Kevin. I would ask Dave a follow up question and he would ignore me. Had to get Kevin to ask Dave again.
      It was just the oddest thing.

        1. UKDancer*

          Yes definitely. I had a job where I had to administer surveys. We did it in a team of 2 people. I always remember how annoying the men were (and it was always men) who refused to answer the questions until my male colleague repeated them.

          It’s so rude.

      2. Anonymous cat*

        I’d be tempted to say, Kevin, ask Dave why he refuses to answer questions from me?— just to see if he’d answer!

      3. Ezzle*

        I find this comment very amusing because I know two cats called Kevin and Dave, and Dave often ignores me because he isn’t a fan of people. Kevin would probably use this situation as a chance to chase Dave.

  4. Yes And*

    I work in an industry with a long history of exploitative internships: long hours doing physical labor or menial tasks for little to no pay. They could get away with it because it’s a passion industry for many, and hard to break into.

    Then one day, the industry rubbed its eyes, looked around, and wondered why its entire leadership pipeline was composed of white kids from the upper middle class.

    In general, the industry has (very recently) gotten a lot better about these kinds of internships. But there are still some old-school “I paid my dues so you should too” types who need to have this explained to them.

    I am adamant that before my current organization takes on interns, it develop an actual program for training and mentoring said interns.

    1. I strive to Excel*

      A friend of mine is in the actuarial profession, which is generally not a passion industry for anyone. The industry is desperately trying to increase their diversity. The process to become a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries is roughly as follows:

      * College degree required – not a specific decree (my friend’s degree is in History), you just have to have a degree. Maybe 4 colleges in all of the US have an Actuarial Science degree, last time I checked. And it’s not normally the big colleges.
      * Several very expensive classes
      * A hard exam
      * Several more expensive classes
      * An even harder exam

      All this is done over a period of ~5-6 years, *after* the college degree. You can usually start working as an actuary after exam #1.

      Surprise surprise, the only way people tend to learn about this career is either by working with one or by being related to one, so the pipeline is almost exclusively upper middle class white kids.

      1. UKDancer*

        Laughing at the actuary thing. I hadn’t heard of the profession until I was at university and shared a house with 2 people studying it. They were cousins and were doing it because one of them had a brother who had already qualified and encouraged them.

      2. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

        I work extensively with actuaries and I’ve never met people who love their jobs more. They’re usually people who love love love math and can’t believe someone pays them for doing math all day.

        1. I strive to Excel*

          I’ve also had that experience with actuaries loving their job! I call it “not a passion job” because it’s not like social services/education/medical professional/not-for-profit/other jobs where there can be a pretty sizable guilt factor keeping people in terrible jobs, or something like acting/animation/music where kids dream of doing it as kids.

          Also the industry does tend to pay pretty well, even for hideous overtime.

        2. Panicked*

          I looked into being an actuary when I was a young 20-something with no path forward. Everything I looked at screamed “Hate math? Don’t be an actuary.” Since I barely passed algebra, I switched tracks pretty quickly. It’s a great field if you like math!

        3. Great Frogs of Literature*

          My aunt says that medical actuaries are one of the highest-ranked fields in terms of job satisfaction. She also told me that (at least ~40 years ago) a passing score on the actuarial exam was… 40%? I think it was 40%. Something ridiculously low. She had no clue why they didn’t make the exam a little easier and raise the passing score.

          1. I strive to Excel*

            It’s because it’s the actuarial equivalent of the bar exam, or the CPA exam.

      3. ScruffyInternHerder*

        I’m really sad to learn that architecture is not the only discipline that is like this in structure.

        Accredited degree
        Completion of the internship program (in theory, its 3 years. But at least at the time I started, you’d best be working in a LARGE firm that wanted its interns to complete things in a timely manner). Also, at the time I started this, the pay was ridiculous because firms could get away with it.
        Extremely difficult exam (barely above a 50% pass rate; I don’t know if that is first time or all attempts, being that I long ago gave this up)

        Kicker is that I outearn most of those I got those degrees with…because I wandered into a different corner of the overall discipline. I do not practice as an architect, nor even come close.

          1. ScruffyInternHerder*

            Its a fun niche of the overall construction industry. Can’t really say exactly because I’d surely out myself, but I get to use the principals of design that I learned in architecture and the day-to-day “so how do we really build it” that I learned on the fly. Every day is a little different. I spend most days in the office but have a go-bag that has clothes and boots for field work.

            And I did indeed spend three summers herding our department’s interns. They were very well compensated for their efforts with us, and had the range of actual origin, national origin, and “family wealth” that you get when you actually compensate them well and assist with housing locally. (We had a WIDE range of interns)

      4. Half a Cupcake*

        Huh, the actuaries I know were the type of people who looked up “what careers use the most math” when they were in high school and then just relentlessly pursued it.

        My sister was one of those kids too, but she ended up in aerospace engineering. She still gets annoyed that she doesn’t get to do as much fun math as she’d like, though.

        (She’s also a devoted AAM reader. Hi, there!)

      5. Am I really a boss?*

        My stepdaughter’s boyfriend is studying to be an actuary. His major is some sort of economics/math combination at a large state technology university. He is a biracial, first generation college student son of an Central American immigrant single mother. His stepdad is a mechanic. I think the programs may get into fistfights over him. I hope they do. He’s a really lovely young man.

        I learned about actuaries/actuarial science in a high level college math class. I think he learned about it as an thing he could do with his math nerdiness.

        My stepdaughter is a construction engineer, which is nerdy in a hard hat and work boots.

  5. Autumn leaves*

    One year we had an intern who was studying hardware. He was great….He was curious, he was interested, he was self-driven and he was helpful.

    He changed majors to software (because of family pressure and money) and we took him on the next summer because we could have used his help. He was lackluster, not driven, needed so much oversight and was in general not helpful.

    it was just really sad to see somebody make a life decision like that.

  6. Pizza Rat*

    Over a decade ago, I scheduled an intern candidate for an interview. The instructions were to check in at the security desk, take the elevator up to the 8th floor, then call my extension from the phone by the elevators so I could let him onto my floor.

    Twenty-five minutes after the scheduled time, someone came by my cube, “Pizza Rat, you have an interviewee waiting in the conference room.” Apparently he’d tailgated someone in and wandered around until he found an empty room, but he didn’t tell anyone he was there to see me until someone asked what he was doing in the conference room.

    He wasn’t that great an interviewee, but I finished the interview and took him to a computer where we had all our candidates do a brief configuration exercise. He sat down, looked at the instructions, looked at the tablet he was supposed to configure and said, “I’m supposed to do this?”

    I hired two other interns that summer who had much less experience and they got through the exercise with no problem at all.

  7. CL*

    Every summer I have to remind my boss that interns are not a replacement for full time staff or even temps. It’s a learning experience for them.

    2. HelenB*

      My boss would do the same thing. Need help doing something mind-numbing? Hire an intern.

      I’ve always figured that if you’re doing the internship right, you may only break even as far as work done (some times, it would have been faster for me to do it myself). We’re an engineering company so the schools expected us to supply interns something engineery to do, not simple filing.

  8. Three Flowers*

    I don’t supervise interns (although I do have student workers!), but I work closely with faculty who are on the other side of the internship-for-credit experience. There is a small and yet surprisingly dedicated pool of people who register for credit-bearing internship courses and just never…get…an internship. Sometimes the same student will sign up and then ghost the class multiple semesters in a row. Sometimes they vanish until week six or so and then send some half-baked (or panicked) message about not being able to find an internship. Did they forget they were in the class/needed an internship to graduate/had access to people whose whole job is helping find internships? Who can say. Be glad you don’t supervise them, I guess.

    (My personal favorites are a kid who skipped *continents* and emailed the professor several weeks late to say they were in another country—not on study abroad—and another who interned for a cannabis farm, where they were a very dedicated worker—dedicated student, not so much.)

    1. UnCivilServant*

      I’m not sure how helpful the internship offices were for other people, but I had great difficulty in conveying the fact that, as someone with no credit and no money, I didn’t have the funds to front a first month’s rent, security deposit, or food for any of these distant openings they suggested, only responding “but it’s a paid internship” as though that would bridge the funding gap between where I was and that first paycheck. With what I had at my disposal in limited connections and no funds, I was limited to openings where I could borrow couch space, and the discussions with the people I was direct to for help were exercises in frustration.

      1. Angstrom*

        Good point. Paid internships are more inclusive (financially) than unpaid ones, but still out of reach for a lot of students.

      2. Three Flowers*

        Yes, this is absolutely a huge deal! I would prefer that colleges require work experience but maybe not positions formally classified as internships, and/or helped students find remote internships or internships that include housing. Even when internships are local during the academic year, they cut into students’ ability to do the best-paid work they can get (around here, often Target or McDonald’s believe it or not).

        That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about students who simply don’t follow through in any way, to the point that I wonder if they’re living my personal nightmare of forgetting they signed up for a course until exam day. There are plenty of sympathetic internship challenges too (trying to intern for the feds, trying to find an internship that is both paid and relevant, legit delays, students who register for classes they know they’ll have to fail because they have to have X number of hours to get their financial aid, etc).

    2. Ginger Cat Lady*

      In my undergrad, many years ago, we were required to take an internship class. But we were told NOTHING about the class or the internship ahead of time. I registered for the class the final semester of my program, as we were supposed to.
      First day of class, during introductions, were were asked to share our name, our emphasis, and what internship we had lined up. Of the 15 students in the class, only 3 had already made arrangements for an internship. We simply did not know that we were supposed to have done that! There was nothing in the course description, the guidance office was and had always been a joke, and it was awful. 7 or 8 of them did manage to find something within the first week, but I and a few others were forced to drop the class and delay graduation. We were very upset.
      So maybe don’t blame the students who still don’t have an internship after starting the class, and make darn sure students know and have support & guidance in finding an internship!

      1. Three Flowers*

        That is awful and totally irresponsible on the part of your program! It’s also an equity issue and puts students in a difficult high-stakes situation. And cost you an extra semester of tuition! Eff that with prejudice.

        The cases I am talking about are not that (not put off until the final semester, and they absolutely know what they have to do). Sometimes students just put off the supported-but-independent work so long they create these situations and then handle them by pretending they don’t exist. It’s a problem with classroom courses too, but more straightforward for faculty to manage. As educators, we try to identify that tendency early and get them into coaching, especially when anxiety and executive function challenges are having an impact. It’s basic workplace readiness. And they are constantly getting referred to placement specialists who can help mitigate some, not all, of the equity issues. (Unfortunately my institution is not one of the rich ones that provide lump-sum stipends to students doing a summer internship to ensure they can cover their up-front expenses.)

        But some students really do just blow it off, which is as frustrating to the supervising faculty—who are under pressure to pass students they shouldn’t—as it would be to workplace intern supervisors who would come back here telling horror stories about the same people. And there are definitely some roll-your-eyes-to-the-sky frustrating/funny stories that come out of it.

  9. MechE31*

    Was asked to manage an intern that my company hired from a high school program that gave internships to students who had just graduated and were going to go into STEM. These were very good paying internships, especially compared to anything else, that lasted 10 weeks.

    The first clue that the intern needed some guidance was when he showed up in sweatpants and a not quite work appropriate T-shirt the first day. We’re an office where jeans and a polo is considered appropriate but most where khaki’s/slacks or a polo. I’d talk to him about office dress, it’d change for a day or 2 and then go back to sweatpants and t-shirt. I probably had that conversation every week over the course of the summer.

    He was given to my group because he showed interest in the projects we were working. We had him shadow someone his first few days and gave him very basic and appropriate tasking. Later that day I got a call that said I don’t like this type of work, can I get anything else. Asked him what he saw during the shadowing that he wanted to try. Tried that tasking with similar results. Note that he never completed a task before asking this (I don’t think he finished 1 assignment the whole summer even after talks about finishing these 2-3 day tasks before giving up).

    After that repeated itself and we were on week 5, I talked to my manager and HR about ending the internship early. They essentially said that we should let the internship play out for 5 weeks and make a no-return suggestion. I told him to just shadow the team. At week 6, he came to me and said I’m heading home and not coming back because he had to focus on himself before college.

    The next year he sent me an email asking for a recommendation. It went to my spam folder since it was external and looking like phishing. I saw it about a month later after he emailed back nevermind (also in spam).

    1. Seashell*

      I wish my kid in college could have gotten any sort of internship thus far. He would have worn exactly what the workplace wanted and done the most boring stuff without complaining.

      1. I Love the Olympics*

        My kids did not get internships…they did have part-time jobs in college. They were all business majors. And they all got decent jobs after graduation.

  10. LCH*

    D: the story with Rick is horrifying because of the lasting implications, but also, it was on the supervisor to make sure there was a substitute supervisor for Rick while they were away. horrifying.

      1. Antilles*

        For the “access”, it honestly reads to me like Rick just had the same “access” as any other employee. It’s just that ordinary employees would either (a) recognize it’s confidential or (b) not read it except perhaps for personal curiosity.
        I assume it never even crossed OP’s mind that Rick would go wildly beyond the assignment of “ask for PDF copies of existing contracts”. I’ve given similar assignments to interns before and it certainly never would have occurred to me that someone would try to renegotiate the contracts or try to hire brand new vendors.

  12. Interns are Great*

    I love interns. Seriously even the bad ones are usually so bad they’re funny and I’ve had enough rockstar interns that it does make up for the hassle.

    Most of them really just want to do a great job and usually get there in the end. I’ve had 2 that have stood out on the wrong side. The first one was a napper… I had to tell his direct manager to move his cube closer so that he could keep an eye on him.

    The second one was more of a lesson to a new manager than anything else (She was new to supervising and it was a low stakes way to get her experience with a bad hire.) Keep in mind we were late to the party in recruiting and we didn’t want to lose our intern slot so under normal circumstances we would have hard passed from the get go.

    Some of the highlight reel includes:

    1- His and another candidates resume were identical. They were both told whoever fesses up first gets to continue in the process. He fessed up first and gave us a real-ish resume
    2-He was spectacularly bad at just about every basic Microsoft app… word couldn’t use it, excel nope, visio never heard of it
    3- He just sort of didn’t do anything. He would be given a basic data entry assignment and just didn’t
    4- He took full advantage of the COVID quarantine. Before lockdown told us a family member had been visiting from a hot area. Was told to work from home. We then just stopped hearing from him. His manager finally just gave him some excel training to do, but he didn’t do any of that. She spoke with his internship advisor and explained that he was in danger of a bad evaluation and no ‘project’ completed. Intern was told explicitly the same. Nothing changed. The manager gave him a bad evaluation including dates of no-show.

    5-The intern then called me in disbelief asking me to change his evaluation. I asked him what was untrue on the evaluation and he couldn’t find anything. I asked if he was warned that his performance would affect his evaluation, he said he was but didn’t believe his manager or his advisor.

    I told him it wouldn’t be changed. His last comment was “But I might not graduate with this evaluation” I said I understood and wished him good luck. I do kind of wonder how he’s doing. I mean he really did have to put in minimal effort (show up (online) and produce something) and he would have scraped by with a mediocre eval from us.

    1. allathian*

      I hope he learned his lesson. Apparently his actions had never had any consequences for him before!

      By the time I was an intern, I’d been working for about 5 years for several different employers, so while I learned a lot during my internship, at least I knew to show up on time and do my job! I got a great eval, too.

  13. Jiminy Cricket*

    As penance for laughing at these interns, I’m thinking about some of my exploits as an intern:

    –I argued with the president of the institution about the naming of a campaign. Naming that was surely in the works for years before my 19-year-old self showed up and was vetted and backed by people with decades of experience. The president!

    — I re-“edited” a professional copyeditor’s work. Because I had been on the newspaper staff and therefore knew better than they. (Spoiler: No, I did not.)

    — I mocked people who enjoy a beloved giant of American music. In a meeting with the boss’s boss’s boss. When I and everyone else knew he loved this musician. Did I really think I was being clever? Why did I think that was the time and place to be clever?

    These were 20+ years ago. I’m sure there were more. But the people in my office were kind and taught me well and were great references for many years after I left.

    1. Interns are Great*

      See it’s this kind of thing I love about interns. They are wide eyed bunnies in the world for the first time!

      The vast majority (with a little mentoring) go on to cringe at their interny selves :)

      1. Jiminy Cricket*

        Wide eyed bunnies, exactly! We/they/all of us are new to the working world at some point. Most of us figure it out.

    2. The Prettiest Curse*

      These are all hilarious! Examples 1 and 2 are great demonstrations of misplaced intern gumption. (See also: Rick.)

  14. Stuart Foote*

    Regarding “brat summer”, is that actually a gen Z thing or have millennials/gen X just convinced themselves that it is? Every time I’ve seen anyone refer anything “brat”, they act like it’s a very obscure bit of youth culture but the person in question is invariably at least 35 writing for an audience of a similar age. Is the current generation of college sophomores rocking out to Charli XCX or is everyone just assuming they are because we like her latest album?

    1. Ask a Manager* Post author

      Haha good question. When I was writing that sentence, I asked my 20-year-old niece for a Gen Z pop culture reference. First I spent half an hour googling “gen Z memes,” which made my head hurt, so I turned to her. (She also suggested Charli XCX, by the way!)

      1. Stuart Foote*

        I’m glad that Gen Z appreciates Charli XCX too…”I Love It” is my pump-up song for interviews, sales pitches, etc.

    2. We're Six*

      Millennials and Gen X are two different generations. Millennials are pushing 35-40 now and Gen X are even older.

  15. alle*

    I just had a Master thesis intern who tried to answer every question he had with ChatGPT. I gave him a dataset of the kind I typically use. Instead of reading the scientific papers I had sent him, he uploaded the dataset on some AI tool and tried to get the AI to figure out out to analyze the dataset.

    1. allathian*

      Yikes! I hope that dataset didn’t contain any proprietary/confidential information! I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement when I was an intern because I had access to confidential customer information. I couldn’t have done my job without that access, even as an intern.

  16. CSRoadWarrior*

    About a decade ago, my friend was working for a land surveying/civil engineering company. One summer, his company hired an intern under his supervision. Based on my friend said, this intern barely spoke and was a bit standoffish, and seemed quite lost. No biggie, some people are pretty quiet, so I didn’t think it was much of a big deal. And an internship is supposed to be a learning experience so it is okay to be lost when you first start. I would simply just ask questions.

    Then one morning, my friend told the intern to do some tasks, and the intern proceed to look like he was going to cry. My friend was understandably put off by this but didn’t make any comments. Still, all summer long it seemed this intern drove my friend crazy. It didn’t seem that this intern wanted to work at all. Not sure what became of him after 10 years, but still. Not really a way to behave at work.

  17. r*

    Our internship program is deliberately structured to be an “first intro to the industry” for young people. We had an 18 yo intern last summer who decided pretty early in the process that he wasn’t going to be professionally interested in what we do. He pretty much checked out and didn’t complete his projects. Towards the end of the internship, he says to me “Can I ask you for some feedback?” and I’m thinking oh my gosh, is this the moment he gets self-aware about how this all went? Then he flips his phone towards me and says “What do you think about this logo for my marketing company?” Turns out he’s been working on setting up his new social media business all summer. Wherever he is now, I hope he’s doing the work he really wants to do!

  18. Heffalump*

    “I had a young employee who used to invite her boyfriend to work so she and him could make out. I still remember her expression when I pulled her aside to tell her that this was not OK. She stared at me for a good 30 seconds before saying, `But I love him.’ I still don’t know what she expected me to say to that.”

    She probably expected the manager to say, “Oh, in that case it’s OK, carry on!”

    And then, of course, there were the dress code interns.

    1. Allemagne*

      OMG. I worked somewhere with basically no dress code. “Make sure your body is covered” was essentially the dress code. And we still had an intern who needed serious guidance in that area.

    2. The Unionizer Bunny*

      The dress code interns?

      The ones featured on this very site eight years ago?

      The ones who, if not for being unpaid, would have been engaging in exemplary concerted activity as defined by the federal government (“circulating a petition” and “joining with co-workers to talk directly to your employer”) and thereby protected from disciplinary dismissal?

      2. Little John*

        Yes! Exactly! Thank you! Those interns! It’s been years and it still makes me mad that more people don’t see it this way.

  19. Martine*

    We apparently had a disgruntled intern. One day we found a copy of a film called (roughly translated) “Rebellion of the Interns” in the mailbox. Anonymous of course.

  20. Llama Llama Workplace Drama*

    We had an paid intern (Software development) who was assigned to shadow another employee. This guy would go to meetings and then spin his chair around backwards and face the window and play on his phone. This was also back in the early days of a certain orange president and one day we received an email from a director indicating that whomever was broadcasting a ‘F!ck ‘ wifi hotspot needed to turn it off. Said director was walking around the floor watching the strength of the wifi signal and trying to figure out who it was. It was the intern. (I can appreciate the sentiment but when a director level manager is walking the floor trying to find the person then it’s time to turn it off) Almost all interns were offered fulltime employment… this guy wasn’t.

    1. Llama Llama Workplace Drama*

      I forgot you can’t use brackets.. that should be ‘F!ck ‘orange president’s name”

  21. Interns are Great*

    Protip: If you want a steady stream of good interns try to hire a TA. For years we had our card passed around the TA’s at the local university and the previous one would recommend a buddy and pass on a resume.

    We needed this because our HR wasn’t great at intern recruitment, they finally got a bit better but until then we had a steady stream of really good interns.

    Now that I think of it, it also gave them a good lesson on networking :)

  22. PropJoe*

    Like a lot of the commenters here, I would’ve loved to have an internship while I was in college.

    My school had no internship requirement, and the amount of support provided wasn’t much more than “lol good luck hope your family is rich & knows people.” I didn’t have a car, and nobody in my family could’ve possibly spotted me the cash needed to afford an apartment (especially one at a likely-usurious short term rate), and none of us had ever had an internship before so I had no institutional knowledge to draw on.

    I wound up spending my college summers working as a cashier at the grocery store. At least I got way more hours per week than I did during school.

    It was mildly disheartening though, to come back from summer and hear my classmates talking about how awesome their internships were & how much they learned, while all my work excitement consisted of idiots trying to buy booze or cigarettes with fake IDs. I frequently wondered to myself about how was I supposed to have any chance at getting a good office job if I couldn’t do what my peers were born into.

    I have to be honest though. If I had somehow gotten an internship (which would’ve had to be on campus or somewhere that was within bike riding distance), I had enough mental health issues going on that I could’ve featured in someone’s tales of “interns who were sorta decent at the job but had no social skills at all and just couldn’t fit in and wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting hired fulltime.”

    I’m in a decent place now, but I still wonder how much of the BS I’ve gone through in life could’ve been avoided if I’d been able to snag an internship. Would’ve been nice to be one of my peers graduating in the early 00s and walking right into a job paying $70k, when 20+ years later I’ve still never made that much in a year.

    1. Gumby*

      If it makes you feel better, I did have an internship one year and still did not walk into a job paying $70k at graduation. (Went the ‘biking distance from campus’ route. Also had a part time job *on* campus that summer to cover the cost of living in the dorms. The company was great. Though it was more of a summer job than an internship – minimal oversight, but everyone was nice and generally helpful, etc.)

    2. Orv*

      I did an internship, but then I graduated right after the dot-com bubble popped. I had to get my first job during a period when the market was glutted with tech workers, which has permanently lowered my earning potential since everyone wants to base their offer on what you made previously.

      I think I would have made way more if I’d gone for a 2-year degree instead of a 4-year, just because my timing would have been so much better. Guys who graduated a couple years before me really got to cash in on stock options from tech startups.

  23. Resume please*

    We had a paid intern show up in gym shorts and a ratty t-shirt. We are a buttoned-up accounting firm. He seemed shocked that he was told to go home and change (after his orientation training,) and didn’t seem to notice or care that he was the odd one out in terms of clothing

    1. UKDancer*

      I must say I was glad when I did a summer placement with a law firm as a student thst they had a session telling everyone what the dress code was and giving images of the right sort of clothes. I had no idea and at least one of my fellows was taking Ali McBeal as a model.

      Being given a picture of someone in black trousers and a blouse or shirt and told “this is the sort of thing” was unbelievably helpful.

      They weren’t very fussy so I wore M&S trousers and a roation of tops in various colours.

    2. allathian*

      Some people don’t seem to care if others look askance at them for not fitting in. One of my maternal uncles was like that, he wore a short-sleeved button-up collared shirt and stonewashed jeans to my cousin’s (his nephew’s) daytime summer wedding when everyone else was in summer suits (any color but black or navy blue) or the sort of dresses/skirt suits/pant suits that are appropriate for a daytime summer celebration. I wore a magenta top with a pink calf-length skirt (the shortest skirt I was willing to wear at the time, now it’s ankle length because I don’t show my legs in public anymore) with a magenta flower print and a matching jacket, dark tan flat shoes and purse.

      Granted, my uncle was extremely shy and probably had some undiagnosed social anxiety because while he was great with small kids, he couldn’t talk to women or visibly adolescent girls unless he was drunk. Luckily he was a cheerful drunk and never said or did anything inappropriate to me, my sister or any of my cousins so none of us were afraid of him. What he wore probably counted as dressing up for him, normally he always wore t-shirts (with or without cardigans/sweaters) and sweatpants. Sadly he died not long after the wedding from alcohol-related causes.

  24. Fern*

    My embarrassing intern story about myself.

    I got my first internship when I was 17 or 18. I was working as a shipping clerk. We’d pack large shipments (the kind that need custom expandable foam or get put on pallets) and unpack shipments and deliver the items to where they would be used.

    Growing up my mom had always worn skirts and dresses to work. What little instruction in “professional dress” we got at school also emphasized the importance of women wearing skirts or dresses (or skirt suits) as a professional woman.

    That caused me to show up on my first day in the only skirt I owned at the time which I had apparently outgrown by length about 2 years prior. I remember being uncomfortable because it was short, but not realizing quite how short it was and how inappropriate it was. I also didn’t wear skirts regularly so I’m sure I had some bad habits around how to move in a skirt or dress.

    Luckily a woman pulled me aside and said that the mini-skirt I was wearing was cute but khakis, colored jeans, or regular jeans without any tears or holes would be fine with a button down, polo shirt, blouse, or sweater. I did the rest of the summer in black or khaki jeans and blouses, and remember the experience fondly.

  25. You want stories, I got stories*

    My daughter the intern, just drove a golf cart through the employee car gate. She thought she was in reverse and wasn’t. Broke it off of its hinges, and got the golf cart stuck on it. I had to pry the gate off of the cart. She did this in front of her parents and favorite aunt as we were there to get a tour of her place of work.

  26. Alan*

    My favorite story wasn’t from an intern at all, but from a brand new fresh-out. They hesitantly came to me one day and asked if it would be okay if they used their own money to buy a second computer monitor for their desk at work, because they had always had two monitors at school and thought that they could be more productive. When I told them that they could just order whatever they needed through the corporate IT folks, it was this giant revelation. “Wait, I can order whatever I want to do my job?” “Well, yeah, except for a very few expensive things that require approval.” “WOW!” I still love that story.

    1. Bitte Meddler*

      Oh, geez, that was me in one of my early corporate jobs. My boss had tried to call me as I was making the one-hour commute into the office and it went to voicemail because my cellphone battery had died. It was an old phone (a Motorola MicroTac!) and the battery would only hold a charge for an hour or two, and I’d forgotten to plug it in until I’d woken up that morning (sooo, not a full charge).

      I explained the battery thing to my boss when he asked why I didn’t pick up. He looked peeved and said, “So buy another battery.”

      I literally laughed out loud and said, “I *wish* I had the spare money to buy another battery!”

      And then he looked at me like I had three heads and said, “Buy another battery and expense it.”

      I did a confused head tilt, and he said, very slowly, “Buy another battery and the company will *reimburse* you.”

      Ohhhhhh….

      I’d had no idea that was a thing.

  27. Poopsie*

    My department is out of the way so we often have people come down to escape for a bit and have a chat. One of our admin staff told us that one of the interns last year was handed an envelope and told to bike it to the client. So she did. But instead of doing what was meant and booking a courier, she went out of the office, found the nearest Boris Bike rack, rented a bike and cycled over to the clients office. Everyone was wondering where she had got to. Poor woman, she must have been so confused about wondering if this was really what the job role was about.

    And that’s one of the reasons why when people start commenting about ‘why did they do that/why did they ask this’ I remind my colleagues that everyone’s brain works differently and what might be obvious to you, isn’t always to other people.

    2. fhqwhgads*

      I do kinda think “bike it to the client” is a weird way to say “send a bike courier”. I mean, I wouldn’t have rented a bike, but I’d almost definitely have said “wait what?”

      1. londonedit*

        I’d have known it meant ‘courier’, but that’s only because I spent a year work on a reception desk 20-odd years ago, in London, when literally everything was done by courier. I think bike couriers are far less common these days, because most things are just sent via email or WeTransfer or whatever, rather than printing out and biking documents around the place. I can absolutely see a recent graduate these days not having a clue what ‘bike it over to the client’ meant, and I can absolutely imagine someone thinking well, I don’t want to admit I have no idea what that means, so I guess I’ll find a bike and take it there that way!

      2. Nightengale*

        yeah ditto
        Mind you I do have my own Amelia Bedelia tendencies.

        But that sounds like pretty specific jargon that people reasonably might not be expected to know. They would know what a bike courier IS, but not that “bike it to the client” meant to arrange for one.

        One day near the end of my pediatrics training (so I thought I knew some things about medicine and probably did) I was rotating through a different hospital than usual and a child had respiratory symptoms. My plan was to order a swab for common respiratory viruses (this was long before COVID) The doctor told me to “NP the baby”

        He wanted me to get a Nurse Practitioner and do what with her?

        No he wanted me to order a viral swab which was obtained nasopharyngeally. NP. My home hospital would have called that a viral respiratory panel.

      3. Lenora Rose*

        IME, most offices also have a standard courier they use on contract, often with proprietary (if often self-explanatory) computer program or at least a telephone number to call and some standard data they have to give besides addresses. I’ve had a location need to train courier instructions for staff who have years of reception experience. So there were definitely things the intern should have been told besides “bike this”.

        Kudos to them for problem solving, though.

  28. Sunshine Gremlin*

    My company has seasonal internship programs, we pretty much always have interns here.

    All of our interns have gotten very attached to me, the HR manager. One didn’t know what HR meant and another said “oh, it’s Homie Resources!” and whenever he has a question for me, he starts off with “homie to homie, got a minute?”

    I had recently asked for volunteers that were stronger than me to help move furniture and the first two volunteers were an intern and a former intern we hired full-time. I had pushed the accent chairs in my office off to the side, facing each other, to make room for them to move a cabinet. The current intern was eating an ice cream sandwich and initially set his ice cream down on my desk, bare, no napkin. I protested so he decided to finish his ice cream in one of my chairs. The former intern thought it would be funny, since they were pushed together (with how they were sitting, imagine a small, bright orange clawfoot tub, but higher up), to sit in the other chair, knees touching, and stare into each others’ eyes while the intern finished his ice cream. I was quick enough to snap a picture, which is now framed on my wall.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      This all sounds adorable, like ducklings that have imprinted on you. “Homie Resources” indeed!

  29. Perihelion*

    I found the bit about the limp handshake at the end of the article a little odd – are “firm handshakes” really still a thing I need to worry about? Seems old-fashioned.

    1. Frank Doyle*

      As long as people are still shaking hands, you should endeavor to have a handshake that is firm but not overwhelmingly so. It’s not that difficult, you don’t need to “worry” about it, you just need to do it thoughtfully.

    2. Interns are Great*

      Yes, they are. Please find someone you trust (and has a good handshake) and practice.

      The best way to describe how to shake a hand is to approach the other hand with your hand thumb out and fingers together. You aim for the web of your hand to meet the web of the other person’s hand. When those two bits meet you close your hand around theirs firmly (don’t crush) and shake 1 or 2 times then let go.

      Hard to describe which is why you should find someone to practice with.

      1. PhyllisB*

        Yep. When I was 14 my mother remarried ta man who was a Navy Chief. The first things he taught my sister and me was: 1. How to give a decent handshake (Our response? Southern women don’t shake hands. His? in this house they do!!) 2. How to tell military time. You would be surprised how handy both of these skills have been over the years.

        1. Polyhymnia O’Keefe*

          In my high school “life skills” class, we did a unit on job interviews and practiced handshakes. All of the church kids who had grown up shaking hands during the greeting/passing the peace our whole lives had a distinct advantage over some of the others who had never had the chance to practice.

    3. tangerineRose*

      I was hoping the handshake would have become out of date by now. Have we learned nothing from the pandemic?

    4. Phenolphthalein*

      When I was a young child, I met a well-to-do, very old lady who I guess wanted to instil some manners in me and offered her hand to shake. I don’t think I’d done such a thing before, and I shook her hand so excitedly she was quite alarmed.

      So many years later as a student, I was lucky to be visiting another university, and met an American professor who had in his (not very recent) youth also worked for my advisor. I shook his hand, but ever since the old lady incident I’d been scared to do so with any gusto.

      He genuinely said “ew, weak handshake”, and thus came my second handshake trauma!

  30. EngineerMom*

    At my first internship, the summer after my freshman year of college (my birthday is in August, so I was still only 18):

    My boss introduced me to this lady in early 40s, who I would be working with as part of the larger team. Somehow, it came up that I was only 18 (I looked & sounded older because I’m tall and was completely comfortable talking with adults).

    Her: “18??!! I have JEANS that are older than you!”

    Everyone else: *crickets*

    Me (thinking): what am I supposed to do with that information?

    Eventually, everyone just sort of laughed and moved on, but I still remember it 20+ years later because it was just such a strange thing to hear from an adult in a professional setting!

    2. SimonTheGreyWarden*

      I had a supervisor at an early job tell me she had sweaters older than I was.

  31. urban planner*

    I once had an intern move from one time zone away (ie 1 hour time difference) to take an internship in my office. For WEEKS, she would talk all afternoon about how tired she was because of the time change and how it was hard for her to do her work because she wasn’t yet adjusted to the new time zone.

    1. Orv*

      When I graduated from college I’d done VERY little traveling, even to other states. It’s a little funny to think about now, but the idea of changing time zones was very novel to me.

    2. allathian*

      Yup, this is me. I get jet lag for two weeks every time we switch to and from DST. The direction doesn’t matter, only the change does. I’ve been like this all my life, and it’s the main reason why I’ve never traveled outside of Europe. If I ever get a windfall inheritance or win the lottery, I’ll visit the US on the Queen Mary 2, the only ocean liner still operating. I might manage the trip to the US flying, but the return would be much harder to adjust to, even for me and I’m a pronounced morning person.

  32. Apex Mountain*

    The weirdest intern story I know happened about ten years ago at an old job. One of our marketing directors who was married (w/little kids unfortunately) had an affair with the intern. The intern stayed on after her internship but she was moved to a different department.

    I left shortly after this, but in the years since the marketing director got divorced, married the (former) intern, now they are both VPs at this same company and have kids of their own.

  33. (sorta) the dress code intern*

    I was the dress code intern once, but … I was in dress code. What I failed to realize was that you can’t just mix and match permitted shoes, permitted bottoms, and permitted tops (apparently) and get a permitted outfit, so I made the mistake of pairing boots with a dress or skirt pretty often, which was a no-no for our business formal office (which I now recognize, but at the time I was poor and making my outfits stretch since I was getting credit for the internship and thus unpaid). Rather than anyone telling me that was inappropriate, I got invited back for a second (unpaid) internship on the strength of my work, then called into HR at the beginning of the second internship and told by HR that boots + skirt/dress was inappropriate and (this quote is forever seared into my mind) “Everyone was talking about this behind your back for months!” The HR rep said this. HR.

    I should have quit on the spot but instead I spent the day crying in the bathroom and then finished the internship cobbling my outfits into business formal dress. No clue if they ever fixed their dress code, but anyone I talk to who’s worked there says the culture is still horrific.

    1. allathian*

      Mmm yeah. The only way I’m ever wearing a dress or skirt that’s shorter than ankle length is if I can wear knee-high boots as well. I’m not showing my varicose-veined and cellulite-ridden legs in public. Luckily it hasn’t been an issue at my job, nearly everyone wears pants regardless of gender. Or knee-length shorts if it’s hot enough. Last week when I went to the office my boss wore denim shorts.

    2. basically functional*

      Wait, boots with skirts are inappropriate?? The things I learn on this site!

    3. Lenora Rose*

      That’s… not a rule. I mean, I understand it if you were wearing, oh, outdoor boots, winter boots, boots that aren’t work appropriate; then they’re not suitable for office wear regardless.

      But I have worn indoor-suitable (& chunky-heeled) boots with skirts, and this isn’t some fashion faux pas anywhere but in that HR’s mind, or maybe that office. Any office where that’s an offense at all is an office with strange internal rules.

      More, one where folks are talking about something they see as a dress code violation for months behind someone’s back without a healthy conversation about it is an office full of bees *even if they were right*. Them being wrong as well is just icing on the beehive.

  34. EarlTheSachem*

    The publishing intern alphabetizing by first name reminded me of one of one of my college History professors.
    Not surprisingly for a History prof, his office was more library than workspace; there were books everywhere. If you wanted to sit down, you had to move a pile or three. For reasons known only to him, he had everything sorted by publication date. Nobody understood it, or why he chose it, but clearly it worked for him.

    1. fhqwhgads*

      I guess if he’s more likely to remember “so-and-so’s book from 1963” than the title… makes sense.

      1. EarlTheSachem*

        Probably something like that. He was, not surprisingly, REALLY intelligent and well-spoken, Ivy League educated, and a terrific professor. And just a wee bit…odd.

    2. Not Australian*

      To be fair, when I studied librarianship – way back in the last century – we were told that any classification scheme was valid as long as it was internally consistent and logical, and taken to see a library where all the books had identical bindings but were shelved *by size*.

  35. OfficeVultures*

    I would so be the free food intern. Sign me up.

    Honestly, at most places I’ve worked regular employees would totally do that. That’s why such parties are not that widely advertised.

    1. Coffee Protein Drink*

      Most definitely. People can be like sharks attracted to blood in the water.

  36. flamingoAudacity*

    current intern announced to everyone, included the people who hired them, that they didn’t like the sector we work in, didn’t see it lasting another 5 years and was only here to pad their resume.
    yes, intern was a nepo hire as well.
    Intern also didn’t understand why the stock market was closed on the weekends, that maternity leave is “just for a new mom to sit at home for 3 months while collecting full pay”, and most recently claimed that a quart and gallon were the same unit of measurement.

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