We can get a lot of valuable experience from internships by learning from the best of the best in the field so we are prepared for graduation. Yet sometimes, interns face some pretty ridiculous situations in their quest to fill their resumes. Read these 7 interns biggest work horror stories, and here’s to hoping you don’t have an experience like these this summer.
Left alone
“At my first internship in college, I was the only intern in an office full of adults. They had all been working together a while and would often forget that I was coming in. Once, all of them went to the office in a different part of town for the day and completely forgot to tell me, so when I showed up bright and early to the downtown office it was dead empty. I spent the entire day completely alone without any sort of apology. Safe to say, I didn’t work there again.” -Maggie, 20.
Running late
“For my first day of work with UNICEF in Tunisia, my boss offered to pick me up since she knew I had never been there before and I was by myself. She gave me a meeting spot in front of a mall a few blocks away from where I was staying but since there were no addresses or street signs I got lost and arrived at our meeting spot 5 minutes late. After about 20 minutes I realized I might have missed her and didn’t have a functioning phone yet so I couldn’t contact her. I waited a bit longer, then went to buy a SIM card so I could contact her. By the time I reacher her it was about an hour and a half after we were originally supposed to meet. I was so embarrassed, I was already apologizing to my boss and hadn’t even made it to the office yet! Worst first impression ever!” -Nina, 21.
The misunderstanding
“My internship my sophomore year was for a really great company I was really excited about. I was told throughout the interview process that it was a very hands-on marketing internship, yet quickly realized on my first day that most of my time would be spent as a sales associate in the store. I’ve worked in retail before and this isn’t the field I thought I was getting into, they totally framed the internship as something different than it actually was.” -Katie, 21.
Sexist jokes
“When I was first introduced to one of my assigned clients for my internship, his immediate response was to get angry and say ‘don’t leave me with a woman! Women are crazy, I don’t want to work with her,’ and laughed as if he was kidding although he clearly wasn’t. I ended up learning a lot from him, but this was definitely not a great first impression.” -Lexie, 22.
Coffee runs
“I feel like I have a pretty classic situation where my internship consisted of me running to get my boss’ coffee. On top of this, I wasn’t getting paid. Completely wasted this summer.” -Hannah, 20.
Wasting copies
“I still don’t know how this happened, but at my internship, I went to print out some files and accidentally duplicated them so they printed 30 times. All you could hear throughout the entire office was the machine printing for a straight hour, and my boss later yelled at me for wasting so much material. So embarrassing.” -Emily, 22.
