You’re in your second year of college and realise it’s past time to start looking for internships. After lectures, your friends have things to do, and you, too, want to be a part of the club, right? Turns out that it isn’t as fancy as they show you in the movies and sometimes it’s nothing more than modern day slavery (and you definitely don’t get a cabin all for yourself).
Some folks, though, have it much worse. When internships should ideally be an insightful experience for getting into the industry, the stories shared by these people sound nothing less than corporate horror stories.
1. “My project guide made me sit in the corner with an outdated computer and told me that I was never to leave the room. I would require his permission to leave even for a sip of water or to use the restroom. He said I should do my research ONLY THERE, without moving an inch. And the worst part was: he didn’t even give me an internet connection.
So day in and day out, he made me work for at least 10 hours a day, and kept abusing me while I was at it.”
2. All I was asked to do was copy-paste. Copy from already existing code in the project and remodify it (Changing database values, changing variables, modifying queries….). I didn’t know what to say, I thought I would be learning new things like learning to implement CRUD models and coding etc. but all I was doing was COPY-PASTE!!! I was furious, I asked my mentor to teach me something useful, he said there’s nothing to be taught except copy-paste.”
3. “I was an intern at a lamp store and I worked there for like 2 months and didn’t see a single fucking lamp. I later found out that the whole thing was a front for some sort of an illegal cattle transportation setup and got busted shortly after I got fired.”
4. “One day my super boss was talking and whistling really loud while I had an ear infection and a migraine, so I asked him to please tone it down at least when he was near my desk. His very adult response was to scream directly into my ear. I left in tears, never should have come back.”
5. “The boss was a creep and would seemingly cherry pick girls to sit in his office and work in there for the day.”
6. “I had a mentor at an internship do that to me. I was 21… He was 34. Just ‘jokingly’ hit on me throughout the internship, gave me gifts when I was leaving, asked me if I wanted to go to his house and ‘chill’ when he found out I was single.. yikes.”
7. “My supervisor was super unorganized and would have me cold call facilities to promote her business. Plus she frequently dumped me onto those I was shadowing in the field with minimal instruction on what I should be doing. The whole thing gave me so much anxiety because of the lack of structure and unsupportive learning environment.”
8. “In an office of 10 people, more than half were fired or quit in 3 months. Half of the interns quit. They clearly wanted to exploit us as free labor. I was required to do 8 hours a week with them, that was it, but they tried to pressure me to work for them 30-40 hours a week. Free.”
9. “It went on for the whole nine weeks, where I just stared at a computer screen and was made to feel like a bit of a nuisance if I asked for any work and it doesn’t feel great hearing that there isn’t anything for you to do.”
10. “It was in some production house that I found on Internshala, they were paying peanuts but I agreed to sign up for it anyway. The office was in a shady room of a building under construction and the boss was the only one in the office at the time I entered the first day. I was terrified as the building was secluded and the boss didn’t seem professional. After 2 hours, I made some excuses and left the office. Never returned.”
Also read: 12 People Get Real About Their Worst First Day At Work And It’s Scarier Than You Think
