Clare Sheehan: The plague of summer employment

Is it just me or are internship applications taking over everyone’s lives? I can’t seem to have an interaction lately without the question “What are you doing this summer?” slipping into the conversation. It’s a sickness, really. Everyone’s scurrying around in a cloud of nosiness and jealousy, flailing their CVs in the air and whispering about which jobs so-and-so is applying for. I could try and convince you that I’m not partaking in this madness, but I’d be lying. Someone could tell me they got an internship researching the procreation patterns of naked mole rats, and I’d still want to hurl nunchucks at their face. The plague of summer employment has descended upon us all.

Let me save you the suspense: I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing this summer. I keep searching around for opportunities, but I can’t seem to find a company that considers ‘fluency in meow-ing’ high on the list of qualifications. I know junior year is the time to score your dream job, but is it bad that all I want to do is sit on my couch watching Boy Meets World reruns and binging on mozzarella sticks?

Think back to the summers of our childhood – wolfing down popsicles, cannon balling into the pool, bike riding around your neighborhood (or scooter-ing if you’re like me and didn’t learn how to ride a bike until you were 18). Looking back, being known as ‘that creepy scooter girl’ was nothing in comparison to the anxiety of competing on the undergrad summer job market.

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I miss those carefree, ‘school’s out’ kind of vacations. What happened to the days when diligently learning the lyrics to Eminem’s ‘Cleaning Out My Closet’ or sewing wedding dresses for your American Girl dolls out of Kleenex were considered productive summer activities?

What I fear will inevitably happen to me is that I’ll get a summer job that I hate. I fear this because it’s happened to me before. The summer after first year, I took a job as a camp counselor at a day care program for middle-schoolers. At first, the job seemed perfect. There were field trips, boxed apple juice, and a range of outdoor activities that promised to tan my pale corpse-like skin into a color that actually resembled a living human. In reality, the job was a nightmare. For two months, I chased after a group of sugar-drugged eight years olds who urinated themselves daily and asked on a regular basis if I’d ever had sex with a boy. What did I take away from this summer experience? Kids are dicks.

Still, I haven’t lost faith. There’s gotta be a position for me somewhere. I have a portfolio full of cat pictures to prove it. Before long, I’ll have a slew of high power CEOs begging to pay me millions of pounds to play with their kittens. Just you wait.