Rant about unpaid labor

So yesterday I had a little incident at my internship. I ended up forgetting my lunch at home as a result of being in a huge rush to make it in at a reasonable hour. I was hungry and grumpy and just wanted to go home to get the lunch that I had carefully packed the night before. I had asked my supervisor if I could go get it and she had said it was fine but I wanted to finish the project I was working on before I left. When I finally was leaving out the door, a woman who works in the office as well asked me where I was going and seemed annoyed that I hadn't told her that I was leaving. It wasn't even about the fact that she asked where I was going that bothered me, but her condescending tone that made me mad. I don't think she meant to sound the way she came off but it still affected me negatively and when I got into my car, I was fuming with frustration and anger.

This small incident brought me to think about my role as an intern at the organization. Now, it's different if you get paid but I do not get paid and I think that's pretty common for internships. I am treated well at my internship and am given real work that is useful to the organization but yet, sometimes I still feel a bit strange in terms of what exactly my role is. Should I have alerted everyone in the office before I left to get my lunch instead of just my supervisor? I can guarantee that if no one had seen me leave it would not have mattered since the only person I am responsible for checking in with is my supervisor. Why did it matter so much that I was leaving for the lunch break that I am supposed to be given anyways and I didn't tell an employee of the organization whom I do not interact with on a regular basis? Her reaction made me feel like she felt entitled to yell at me because I'm an intern even though I wasn't doing anything wrong. Also, everyone in the office is new. We even have an employee who started yesterday so naturally I know more about what's going on at the organization than she does. Therefore, right now, I am more valuable than her in the office but I do not get the same type of respect and compensation that she does. Don't get me wrong, I really like both the woman who acted annoyed and the new employee but this issue has nothing to do with personalities and all to do with the fact that I am unpaid, valuable labor.

Now, I know this is what I signed up for. I knew the internship was unpaid and I knew that my title as intern would mean that I am more disposable than the actual employees. Now that I'm done ranting, I think what I learned is that I need to take away everything I possibly can from this experience in terms of skills and make a good impression on the people who work here whether it is my way of doing things or not. This internship is just a small stepping stone to my future and I should avoid getting worked up about the unpaid part.

Connecting to Facebook and Google+

I have connected this blog to a Facebook page (called Transition Phases) and a Google+ page (under the same title). I am more familiar with Facebook and managing pages but I am finding the Google+ is more user friendly for me...Anyways, despite my reluctance to share this blog so upfront with my friends and family on both sites, it's been done.

I am usually a very private person and do not like to share my personal or private life with anyone, especially online. That being considered, it was a big step for me to start a blog like this and especially to make my most recent post public. I am nervous about connecting this blog to even more sites that I belong to so I am having some anxiety about all this. I suppose, though, that I am really not sharing THAT much even though it feels like it to me. It seems that I have this problem in a lot of parts of my life (having the inability to accept and therefore feel comfortable sharing my life with others). Maybe being more open is something I need to be working on in this new phase of my life...

Lessons from my graduation party...

This past weekend my parents and I threw a graduation party in celebration of my receiving a BA from Clark University. It was mostly a family party but a few of my friends from Clark came along with friends from my hometown.

I think that most people can empathize with the experience of having ALL of your adult relatives ask you about what you are doing with your life and having to fake an answer because you don't really know and don't really care. Well, that was sort of the case with me but I actually had something to tell them this time. Even though it was annoying to be asked by absolutely every family member at the party what my future plans are, at least I had an answer. I am getting a master's and will graduate a year after I received my BA. It seems that my plan for this next year was sufficient enough to satisfy their curiosity without asking about further plans (which I am definitely still working on). Good thing I'm getting a master's.

A bunch of my cousins have started having babies and even though less than a quarter of my cousins came, there were still 3 or 4 babies at the party. I have always had a soft spot for children and started babysitting infants and children when I was eleven years old. With that said, I will NOT be having children of my own anytime soon. I think I have come to this conclusion partly because I have seen how it has changed my cousins' lives and partly because I am obviously more focused on my studies and my career (prime example: the subject of this blog). This is not to say that my cousins' lives were completely ruined by their children, but the changes and sacrifices I have seen them go through as I result of having children are not something I am ready for at this point in my life. Selfish? Maybe, but I am still very young and even writing about having babies seems silly to me. I think that the topic of having babies comes up more in my life now because I am very close with my extended family and many of them are preparing to have or already have children. I am also moving forward out of my undergraduate career and defining myself as an individual and what I want my life to be. I will be a mom in the future but right now I am focused on myself and my studies.

Speaking of babies, I have found myself in a relationship. Literally, I have found myself with a boyfriend and I don't really know how it happened. I am one of those people who is usually perfectly content doing my own thing on my own schedule. In fact, I have always felt like I needed complete control over my life without any interruption in order to function and be successful. Over my four years of undergrad, I became more flexible as my relationships with my friends and my strain on time to complete activities and homework were more intense. I think I have realized that a part of becoming an adult is learning how to be independent and with that comes more responsibilities and less selfishness. I suppose having more of an adult relationship with my boyfriend is an important part of this next phase of my life as I am learning how to be even more flexible and make more of a compromises with my time and attention. As my aunt said after she met him (yes, he met my extended family AHH), "he is a gem!" and I agree with her. Maybe I am not ready for having babies, but I am ready to be more flexible and take life as it comes.

Babies and my boyfriend. Hmmm, interesting post for me to write...

My Movie

Embracing Phases

Yesterday I drove to Connecticut for a good friend's graduation party. I drive a pickup truck that gets relatively good gas mileage for a truck and because everything that I need to drive to in Worcester is usually no more than 15 minutes away from my apartment, buying gas is not a huge problem for me even with my part-time, minimum wage income. As I was leaving for the party, I realized that I should probably fill my truck up with gas as prices are much cheaper in Worcester than in Connecticut and ended up spending fifty dollars...fifty dollars! How am I supposed to afford to do anything when the cost of living is so high?

Ever since I knew I planned to attend a college or university, my dad has warned me that I would, at some point, be a "poor college student" and for some reason I always believed that I could avoid that certain phase. In hindsight, I do not know how I planned to do that. With an unpaid internship that is required for both school and to get real experience to finally get a paying job along with working on a higher degree, there is not much opportunity to earn enough money to save. Therefore, I am indeed a "poor college student" and have failed to avoid the inevitable (ha).

That one moment of paying for gas is only a part of a larger concept that life is filled with different phases that come with challenges and experiences. So I have decided that I need to learn to embrace each phase of my life. Easy, right?

Sparking Interest

I started this blog because I am taking New Media Technologies as a graduate student at Clark University. My professor wanted us to write a blog about our lives, preferably about the place in which we work professionally or something we are passionate about.

My original plan was to write about the Central MA Convention and Visitors Bureau, the organization where I intern, but after further consideration my plans changed. I was sitting at my internship stuffing envelopes for a last minute push on the release of our Spring/Summer 2012 Visitor Guide thinking about what I was going to write in my blog. Going through the list of things that I do while at my internship in my head, I realized that while useful, my daily tasks are not particularly exciting. All the while, I was having a significant amount of trouble stuffing the envelopes. A task that one would think relaxing and methodic proved to be very difficult for me to accomplish and all I could think was, "good thing I'm getting my master's degree, maybe then I won't have to stuff envelopes for the rest of my life".

Now, this is not meant to be a pretentious blog in the slightest. In fact, looking back on my thoughts while stuffing envelopes, I find them quite amusing. My goal in this blog is to share short clips of my life as an aimless graduate student trying to find my way in the "real world". It is a journal, of sorts, covering a particular period of time in my life that I feel others can relate to and that I will find interesting to write about.

The transition out of the college bubble (as a recent BA graduate from Clark) has been a trying one. I am in the real world now. That is all I keep thinking. What does that mean? Does my attaining a higher education really mean that I won't be stuffing envelopes for the rest of my life? Probably not.