internship

on working full-time last summer

During my sophomore fall to spring, I played the internship game. 

I fell fully into the mindset of acquiring an internship — endlessly revising my resume, puckering up my “measurable impact” through LinkedIn bullet points, checking the “not a veteran” and “no disabilities” box endlessly on job applications, kissing up to recruiters at panels and online zoom seminar chat boxes, hoping and praying the door would open for me in one place, any place.

My environment didn’t help. Everyone around me was getting an internship at school, and I didn’t want to feel left out. 

Over 250+ applications in, I was that generic LinkedIn success story — I had landed an internship at a top 30 company as a sophomore. (It’s much harder to land one as a sophomore, equated to being a guy on tinder vs. junior year finding one being like a girl on tinder) Last summer, I worked for State Farm as a design intern. Yes. State Farm. No, I did not get to meet Jake unfortunately. It was my only option and I was so eye-set on getting an internship that I took anything that was paid at a name-brand company. 

fully-paid week-long visit to the state farm hq in arizona

What I did at my State Farm Internship

I was an agency instructional design intern, meaning my job was to simplify and design video and powerpoint content to teach agents different complicated processes that exist during their training. I was actually pretty excited for the role because I love teaching, and designing powerpoint templates was something I already liked to do for fun. 

It sounded good in theory, but while I was working I ran into so many bureaucratic problems that frustrated every last ounce of patience in me. To be frank, I think the most I learned from this internship was that I don’t want to work full-time at a company forever and that I just cannot do meaningless work for pay. 

For one, I spent the first week doing the training  — videos that looked like they were from the 1980s talking about ergonomics of typing on a computer and sitting in a chair, sexual harassment (as if someone will harass me on Skype with no camera), social distancing for COVID (I was the only one on my team in the west coast). After that, I filled out the form that processed through 4 different departments to approve the download of the video editing software I had to learn. That took two weeks out of my 10- week internship. I have 8 years of experience in Final Cut Pro and over 10 years experience in Adobe software but they didn’t give me those to use and paid me to complete training for a similar software I had never heard of. 

Numerous times, in the first few weeks I found myself having nothing to do after finishing the monotonous training videos and going to meetings where I had no idea what was going on. At first, I felt bad doing nothing — I kept my Skype status active to show that I was at my desk and moved my mouse around just in case someone wanted to reach out and get my thoughts on something. 

I talked to my manager about this and to my surprise, she told me to go on a walk, do a painting, or just to relax when I had nothing else to do. I talked to my other friends interning at other companies and many of them did the same. One of my friends at Microsoft that summer was telling me it felt like he was earning money “twirling his thumbs.” No one knew felt like they were making any sort of measurable impact, no matter how much these internships claimed they were “giving their interns real work.” Little did that I realize that “real work” was meaningless too. 

This summer, I vowed that I will not find an internship like this. I thought about either working in a faster-paced startup environment within a large company (like Google’s Creative Labs or Microsoft Research), or to just do my own thing. To my luck and surprise, while applying to internships this time around I was fortunate enough to land a position at Meta Reality Labs in their Augmented Reality (AR) department. I applied to the normal product design internship position at Facebook, but in my first screening interview the interviewer told me he had routed my portfolio and resume to the Labs department. 

All of the other interns I had looked up to at Reality Labs previously were graduate students, and they traditionally have only had graduate students as interns. I’m extremely fortunate to have this opportunity as an undergrad and I’m excited to explore the XR space and learn from those at Reality Labs this summer. 

takeaways

Internships are not the end of the line. I wish someone had told me they really are what you make of it, and to be more careful about assessing the types of work and opportunity we want out of the time there.

Many internship programs are 10-12 weeks long and that is a pretty lengthy commitment to make over self-growth and learning in something you want to do outside of being bound to being given tasks to do. I have to admit getting an internship with Facebook gave me an ego boost, and it’s been difficult ignoring it as everyone seems to have placed the name on a pedestal. I think luck played a huge role in this, and have really been trying to downplay it mentally. I don’t want getting in FB be a definer in hindering my growth and development, as there’s so much more in the world and so much more to learn.

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what i’ve been up to ✨

• I just got back from a very chaotic trip to hawaii (we got kicked out of an airbnb… then the 9 of us squeezed in 1 hotel room for a night lmao… more soon)

germaine’s luau in oahu!

• rented a jeep and drove it around hawaii (first time driving a gas car)

jeep <3

• started becoming a tiktok vlogger for hawaii vlogs

• am kinda broke now from traveling so much + am super tired from traveling so much so will go on a hiatus

• am flying to the uk in 30 minutes 🇬🇧 please hmu if you have friends there and/or have recs on places to hit up

• have been terrible at responding and focusing myself but hopefully will get better as I finally get back to school but in uk (oxford!)

hope y’all had a great new years :) much love 💖