the unpaid internship

i've been seeing them around a lot lately in my job postings: the dreaded unpaid internship.

last year and practically every year before, i was so against them. yes, i needed experience doing things and yes, internships were a good place to start. but... money. money was always the issue. i needed money to live and survive. why should i bother putting in 20-40 hours a week for no payment? it's a catch 22. i need experience which i don't have and i need money, also which i don't have.

but, i had to throw away that mindset this summer and applied to several. some unpaid, some paid, and some which didn't specify (and i'm assuming that they will be unpaid). and then i had a thought: would it be at all possible to be rejected from an unpaid internship? i mean, it's not as if i'm applying for a computer programming intern or a communications intern or an open heart surgery intern. i'm applying for unpaid positions in not-for-profits or companies for project coordinators, environmental things, and marketing. things that i can believe i'm qualified for.

but i'm still not hearing from any of them!

are other recent graduates applying for these internships too and they are more qualified to do the job at hand? more qualified? better suited? their resume/cover letter sounds better? i don't even know how to understand this concept.

i've removed my "unpaid internships are not for me" mind frame and am feeling the stench of desperation like no other. i'm restless. i'm bored. i'm running out of money. it's too hot in my apartment. i'm still drinking rather than cutting down like i intended to do. i'm lazy. i'm unmotivated. i spend hours a day applying to jobs i know i can get and never hear from anyone!

that was until today. i came across this article in the toronto star that sort of made me feel a little better about how things are going. it basically says that half a million young people are unemployed and not entirely looking for work. it also says that those actually looking (2 in 10) were discouraged at the job market. discouraged is an understatement, i think. i applied to several jobs and internships (both paid and unpaid) today and finally received a chance for an interview. finally. my last interview was weeks ago. i was beginning to think there was nothing left in the job market for me at all.

but oh yes... that apparent job i've had since april and haven't started yet. there's still no word on that. june, they said. as far as i know, june is around the corner soon.

i mean, not that i have any idea what day it actually is or anything.

the lights are out

i like to think i don't get scared easily.

okay, that's probably the first lie i've told in a very long time. i'll be the first to admit that i'm afraid of everything. spiders, bugs, commitment, the gathering darkness...

also a lie. except for maybe spiders and commitment.

what i'm scared of currently is the fact that outside of my door, all the lights are out. and fuck, it's scary. it's pitch black. i can't see anything. i don't want to leave my place in fear of what could happen in the five second walk down the hall to the stairs. or what would be even worse is if the stairs also had no lights on, and then i would be royally fucked. i barely want to climb those stairs with the lights on, nonetheless off (see: brother slipping and ending up with a bleeding finger).

but still. it's quite strange. and creepy. and scary. so i'm just going to hang out here for awhile until they maybe turn the lights back on.

what's new on the job hunt, you ask?

well, i had an interview last week for a place that sells school uniforms. she seemed to really like me and felt that i would fit in well with the store. the interview lasted quite some time. she even commented on my outfit (new interview clothes for the win!). she told me that she would make a decision on friday but i never heard from her. i suppose it's for good measure. she said that it would be extremely part-time hours for may, june, and july. maybe one or two days a week. and then august would be full time, all the time, as much as i wanted to work. i figured it would sort of be like that; nobody wants to buy school uniforms in may and everybody leaves things till the last minute in august and september. 

but i never heard from her.

i thought i had nailed it. i expected her to call because she was so impressed with me. i felt pretty good walking out of that interview. but nope, nothing. and i didn't want the job badly enough to call her. but i mean, she DID say she was going to call ME. and i suppose that counts for something.

one of the best things about being unemployed (or rather, employed but have yet to start? apparently i'm supposed to start the event place in june... we'll see about that) is all the time you get to yourself to do the things you want to do. like, for instance, i'm pretty aware that winter hibernation (and my roommate's mac and cheese) made me gain some weight. nothing too significant (friends are saying i look better) but i'm starting to notice and that bothers me. hey, don't get me wrong. i love myself and my body. i just always have the determination to make it how i want it to be.

i started a workout regime this week as for the last few months, i've been extremely lazy. it just involves going for long walks of 40+ minutes 3-4 times a week and a series of at-home exercises including push ups, stretches, sit ups, other ab workouts, yoga and tai chi poses, and a bunch of other things i can do around the apartment, like invisible chair competitions with myself (and charles the mouse when he comes out to play). i've also been doing a lot of in-my-room dancing routines i've taught myself off youtube to get ready for pride in june. i did this and this back in my undergrad for rez events and they were so much fun. i can't wait to get back up on stage again.

i've also started to do the other healthy things i never had much time for or was too lazy to do like floss (the dentist is coming up soon), buy/cook some healthy meals, try to cut back on my drinking (both for my body and for my wallet right now) and sit outside in the sun to get a tan. i've been reading the ground truth because all that 9/11 stuff interests me greatly. next up will be climate wars, a book i've always wanted to read since my undergrad, and that should be by next week or so.

and y'know, the usual of hanging out with friends, playing video games (i'm working through ocarina of time.. god damn water temple), and watching countless hours of tv and movies when i'm that bored.

ganon is so scary.

i guess the unemployed life is not so bad. if only making money wasn't a major issue.

post graduate program review

i learned a lot of really neat things over the past 8 months.

although i won't go into ridiculous detail about everything that happened within the project management - environmental program, here are some of the highlights (expect some major use of cognitive dissonance!):

1. good professor, bad professor 

yes, i sure had a wide variety of instructors. one of them in particular that everyone in the program seemed to have a problem with. he had a tendency to not give any feedback, got angry when people came in late, wouldn't always give a break during class, wouldn't allow you to leave the class when you had to pee, argued with students over more/less grades, got angry if he taught something to us once/seven times and we still didn't understand, didn't see a problem when he handed back the midterms and then was approached by 95% of the class about grades, yelled at students... and the list goes on. he taught two of my classes. that was not fun.

a second professor had a very weird way of grading that was most of the time, extremely unfair. he wanted a ridiculous amount of information in order to be given full marks for each question. his first few tests/quizzes were like this, and once he discovered that only one person in the program had any knowledge on the subject and we had collectively decided that his grading was not good, he changed his marking scheme and made it slightly better for us. until the final exam, worth too much of our grade, which basically screwed everyone over. but i thought it was legit... i studied and memorized a lot of what was on it. i just sort of feel bad for the rest of my program during that exam.

a third professor started off alright and then i stopped going to class. this class had a very small number of people in it and rarely did i ever get any work done. the first assignment i submitted sometime at the end of january was returned to me in march; i had done the whole thing wrong. so i asked to resubmit the assignment and she agreed. then, i didn't hand it any of the other assignments, minus one that i did hand in. when it got to the end of the semester and the final assignment, i did each section of the final assignment and asked if i could still submit the other assignments i didn't do. she agreed but seemed extremely disappointed in me for not doing the work on time. she also yelled at me for not getting the work done on time like almost everyone else. honestly, i just didn't give a flying fuck about this elective course. i spent four days at the end of the semester trying to crunch out those assignments and email them in; she must have accepted them and i must have done a very good job on them despite the "late penalty" i was going to get, as i still somehow got out of that class with an A. 

the rest of my instructors were fantastic, except for my mentor for the internship.

2. the "internship" 

i started this program based solely on the internship component. i have limited experience (see: none) in my field of study, besides shitty summers on clifton hill with tourism and i'd rather be on the environment side of things. what i, and most of the people in my program who were having the exact same problem, were hoping was that the we would gain some valuable experience and skills from this internship.

now, when i think of an internship, i think of literally being in a workplace setting with other people who work there and y'know... doing work. like, hell, if i was just the intern who took notes at a meeting or was in charge of getting coffee or making photocopies or just.. anything in the workplace that needed to be done (hell, i would have cleaned bathrooms if it meant i'd be doing SOMETHING). but this was not the case.

instead, i met with my project sponsor once. the first time, i was sick and wasn't able to meet him. he gave us a project -- to develop an environmental audit checklist and methodology to measure the effectiveness of their environmental performance. cool? i figured maybe as part of the project, we would have to conduct the audit ourselves. wrong. maybe we would have to go in and actually survey employees for our checklist questions. wrong. at the very least, i thought we would be in constant communication with the sponsor and maybe have a few days where we would be on-site, checking things out and gaining that real world experience. nope, wrong again.

so what did we do? well, we created the checklist and methodology. essentially, a 40 page project. it included the actual project plus various project management tools and techniques that we used. also, there were 3 people in my group, and the one guy basically did next to nothing the entire semester. my mentor was a bit of a dick and rarely helpful -- because we didn't really need him for much, but he was always extremely nosy and into our business which didn't help a lot of things. after that already 8 hour day before seeing him, and staying close to another 3 hours with him once a week for no reason, i just couldn't take him any more. it's a good thing i know how to be a dick back.. i can thank my thesis advisor for that.

3. program friends 

despite all odds, the people i met in my program were amazing and i'm glad we all got through it together. these are definitely some people i won't soon forget. and i hope we can hang out and do things all summer -- and that my next year program of green business management will have just as great people. i made some life-long friendships and i'm happy for that!

i like to think of us as community.. kinda.

4. recommendations

i'm pretty sure we were the dawning age of this program. it's only been around 2 or 3 years and yet, supposedly, we have changed it so much. we were supposed to have that one awful professor for a course in the second semester. after we (see: the entire program) took the course coordinator aside and bitched about the professor to the coordinator, he made some changes and hired a wonderful professor to teach us the course in the second semester.

they'll be making changes to the curriculum for next year and not allowing an elective course. i found the elective for us to choose the most frustrating as almost nothing that interested me (or others) was available. about ten students chose a project scheduling class at a different campus in the evening. that class didn't interest me and i wasn't sure how to get to the other campus, nor did i want to have a day that started at 8am and ended at 10pm, so i didn't take it. originally, i started off the semester in an energy course that i went to 3 classes and immediately dropped for a different class -- with the third 'bad' professor. but the elective sort of tore the group apart; some were in the scheduling class, others took online or correspondence courses, some took other random classes. it was just extremely screwed up. our family was not as close as it should have been in the second semester as much as we were in the first semester when we had a fantastic schedule and no 14 hour days.

but, it's over. i graduate and get handed my ontario graduate certificate at the end of june. i would probably recommend this program more with the better curriculum -- and if the internship ever turned into an actual internship. it was a somewhat okay way to utilize the project management skills we gained from the first semester and the risk management skills in the second semester. however, the program and the courses need better organization and a focus with each class relating to each other through projects, assignments, presentations, and lectures. connectivity between courses is key to higher education and learning, and i at least felt that tourism and environment at brock had that down a lot of the time.

onto bigger things in september: green business management. because i've yet to land a job so i may as well dive deeper into my student debt!

unemployed? nah, just looking.

ladies and gentlemen, i'm proud to announce to you that i have been recommended for graduation and will be receiving an ontario graduate certificate at the end of june. 8 months really did go by very quickly.

a thorough review of the last 8 months will be happening shortly.

in the meantime on the job front, i applied to an event staffing place at the end of april who told me to come in and fill out an application. i took the over an hour commute to the headquarters and met with the dude doing the hiring. he basically told me that they would review my application and contact me when i was needed. i help with events and festivals throughout the city of toronto. he sends all the information about the upcoming event/festival via email and i get to choose whether i'd like to work it or pass on it. he said it was likely that i could get full time hours if i wanted.

this sounded fantastic to me as i'd get to work outside all summer and make some money. it wasn't directly related to the environment but it is tourism, so that was okay. also, it was the first place to hire me and with the way things were going, i decided to take it. i told them i was available to work that weekend and they never got back to me. i emailed asking when i would start and they said "the busy season would be starting soon" and he'd be in touch when i was needed.

this job hasn't exactly stopped me from applying to other jobs. i applied for a program coordinator position with a hostel and got a call for an interview. however, after returning the call and getting voice mail, i never received another call again. a couple days later, i went home and emailed the dude asking if interviews were still happening. he calls that day and says he could interview me right then if i was available -- but i was at home. well, shit. if this place couldn't organize set interview times and call me back, i didn't believe they were worth my time. also, i had heard the hostel wasn't that nice. it just essentially would have been a place to utilize the skills i've learned from the past 8 months.

i had a marketing firm call me and ask for an interview even though i didn't apply to them. they came across my resume on monster. i forgot that i even had a resume posted up there. they called on friday and again on monday. i returned the call on monday and they're primary focus was telemarketing/cold calling with financial institutions. totally not what i'm looking for. they said if anything comes up in the environmental field, they would let me know. i highly doubt that'll happen, but i thanked them for their interest in me.

today, after applying to another job at the same environmental store that i've applied to probably about 2-3 times in the last couple of months, i got a call from them but they didn't leave a message. i thought this was very strange. what employer calls and doesn't leave a message?

i'm also enjoying the number of rejection emails i get -- both personalized and unpersonalized. at least i know my resumes are getting read.. even if my resume isn't good enough. two of the dream jobs i applied for are out -- rejected. i've totally re-done both my resume and cover letter. i really hope it helps.

man, i friggin' hate the job search.