My First Internship

I start my internship at The Paley Center for Media tomorrow and I am getting a wee bit nervous.  It was not until this past Friday that I realized I would be starting back at a 40-hour week come tomorrow.  Three days a week at Paley and two days a week at NYU’s archive/study center.  I suppose God figured I would only be able to handle three days with this knowledge or else I may have figured it out a couple months ago when Paley informed me I had the internship and I also agreed to work for NYU this summer.  Either way, the anxiety is there.

I have worked a 40-hour week before.  I did it for over seven years, minus the three years when I was cut back to a 32-hour week.  But the life of a student is different.  In many regards, it is more lax, more in my control.  I do homework when I want.  I choose when I want to show up to class (which, for me, is all the time unless deathly ill).  And on the days I am at school for 12-hours straight, it never feels that way.  There are several breaks, the activities vary, and nothing I do is strenuous.  It sure beats sitting at a computer for 8 hours and typing up bills of lading or emailing back and forth with customers.

That said, I doubt the internship will be taxing and I know the tasks I have at NYU won’t be.  Plus, I will get to come home and have NOTHING to do – no homework, no lingering work issues, NOTHING.  It really is all about the control.  I must be somewhere from 9:00am to 5:00pm each and every day.  I am not just accountable to myself as I have been the past 9 months; I am accountable to an institution.  Yes, NYU is an institution, but for some reason The Paley Center feels more so.  Probably from the pressure I am putting on myself and this job.  Pressure to make something of this position, to secure a job after college, or at least figure out if what I do at Paley is something I want to do for the rest of my life.  Black and white thinking is what I succeed in.

So why don’t I let that go here?  Expectations get me in trouble.  Expectations lead to disappointment.  And expectations obviously lead to anxiety.  I can get used to a 40-hour week again and, as both of my parents assured me, I will enjoy it because I like to have a regular schedule.  When I worked a 32-hour week, I often found myself bored and with nothing to do every Monday.  I just need to make sure I show up tomorrow at 10:30am dressed in business casual (blah!) and open to learning what my job is.  I have this underlying fear the internship won’t work out and I will have to decline it, but I always get that fear when I tell a lot of people about something going on in my future life.  It is the fear of disappointment, of having to go back to all those people and telling them I actually don’t have that internship.  And that is another expectation to let go of.

My fears are always 100 times worse than what actually happens.  I bet you anything I get there Monday, they show me around, plop me down at a desk, teach me how to catalog, and leave me be for the rest of my days.  The life of an intern – stashed in a corner and forgotten about.  Oops, there go those expectations again.  But I like working on my own, so that one doesn’t seem half bad.  Anyway, today I don’t have work.  Today I hopefully will be spending my time in the theater district, enjoying a play and the sunny weather. Tomorrow will still be waiting for me when the day is over.

And PS – no, the photograph has nothing to do with this post, but I took it at a street fair last weekend and thought it was both hilarious and disgusting at the same time.  Fried oreos?  And this was not the only stand selling them.  I guess I shouldn’t knock them until I try them, which will hopefully be never.