Friday | February 10, 2012
Nightmare Summer Jobs and Internships
| Rate Center | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Today's Average Rates Across the Country* | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
By
Carrie Pierce
26 September 2005
Kat Sjurseth had the scariest job experience of her life one night while working at a pool company in Houston. Sjurseth, a junior at Texas A&M University, was told by her supervisor that the university pool needed to be cleaned that night because there was a swim meet scheduled the next day. She decided to begin the work immediately, just to find that the team was there practicing and she would have to wait until 8 p.m. to clean. She ended up staying at the pool until 1 a.m.
“It was in the dark and in the back of a neighborhood in a bad area,” Sjurseth said. “It was awkward for me being a 20-year-old girl to be out there alone.”
As the school year begins, many students are adding valuable work experience such as Sjurseth’s to their résumés through jobs and internships. While there is always the fairy tale story of the perfect internship that landed one a job at the workplace of their dreams or the summer job that paid twice the minimum wage and didn’t require working weekends, there are always horror stories of jobs and internships gone bad.
Surviving through bad jobs and internships can be worth the benefits. According to the School of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, approximately 60 percent of students who have had internships will get a full-time job after graduation. Ninety percent of those with two internships receive jobs. Plus, internships offer a relatively risk-free way to explore a possible career path. No matter how bad a job or internship may be, upon graduation it will probably be the key experience on one’s résumé.
Overworked and Underpaid
Sjurseth has learned this lesson the hard way. For the past five summers, she has been employed by the same Houston pool company, which one would think would just require life guarding during the day and cleaning the pool when it closes. Sjurseth found her experience to be completely different.
“I had to deal with all of the problems,” she said. “I managed four pools when the supervisor should have.”
Sjurseth said she was given complete control and was required to clean, lifeguard, do maintenance, make schedules, receive training and train other pools. She also had to deal with lots of paperwork.
“I was always the one who got the blame for everything,” Sjurseth added. “I was overworked, underpaid and treated badly.”
After working for the company five years, she was hardly given a raise.
“They told me they would give me a certain amount of money, then they paid me $3 less than what they said,” she said.
While students such as Sjurseth find their summer jobs to be too much to handle, others, such as Laura Sansom, a graduate of Louisiana State University, find theirs to be boring. Sansom worked as a student assistant at the finance office at Lamar State College in Port Arthur, Texas. She was one of four student workers cramped in one small office at the same time.
“I sat at a computer and every once in a while I got to shred paper,” Sansom said. “But I did get paid for it.”
The worst job ever
Two summers ago Charles Glover, a senior at Texas A&M, had a more distressing experience when he spent his summer working from 7:30 a.m. to sundown on roofs that exceeded 125 degrees.
“I stripped tiles off of the top of roofs in the middle of the day,” he said. “I was also the new guy so I had to carry shingles.”
Glover often carried approximately 50 to 85 pounds of shingles as the older guys badgered him and his friend.
“We had a pact to look out for each other,” he said.
A month into the job, Glover’s friend got dragged across the roof by the older employees.
“He bled everywhere,” he said. “They told me I was next.”
Glover said he barely made it back to work each day. On a typical day he would get off work, shower and melt into his bed and then slide out in the morning to start again.
“It was the worst job ever and I dreaded each day,” he said. “It showed me the importance of going to get an education so I wouldn’t be roofing my entire life.”
Gofer Boy
Brian Clancy, a student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, took a different route for his summer by getting an internship overseas. Clancy, whose family resides in Venezuela, stayed at home for the summer working at a heavy crude oil drilling company alongside his father. Clancy’s father secured him this job, which the college senior said mainly entailed secretarial work.
“They made me their gofer boy,” he said. Clancy also had to translate papers and pose as a security guard when his work team went out on the docks.
“The job was busy work with internship wages,” he said. “I worked seven days a week and barely made $120 a month. My dad thought it was the funniest thing.”
Clancy’s father’s humor over the situation did not help. One day his father decided to play a practical joke on him. Clancy’s boss went to go get lunch and locked him outside the office in the heat for seven hours dressed in a suit. Clancy said his father played the joke on him so he could get real world experience.
“I got to learn how people really get started,” he said. “You really start at the bottom.”
© 2008, Young Money Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
Tag Cloud
Financial help Center
Newsletter Sign Up
Enter to win a Young Money Career Package by signing up for our newletter.
I’d enjoy hearing from people who have had experiences with government internships.
Thanks, Debra Karplus, author