To intern, or not to intern?

The internship obsession among the current university generation is verging on farcical. Students spend their free time from October to March filling in never-ending application forms with drivel about their leadership skills. If they’re lucky, this will lead to a series of interviews involving expensive travel only for power-happy pretentious interviewers to pepper you about your knowledge of their prestigious bank.

The reward? Wake at the break of dawn every day for July and August. A hellish summer commute in a sweat infested tube carriage. Hour upon hour in the office spent scrawling through the same old BBC Sport articles and flicking through Facebook pictures of fellow students showing off their latest trip around the world or an album entitled “Eurolash 2k13”.

Oh so relaxing…

Friends have travelled through foreign lands exploring “themselves”, while you have been stuck in the office exploring how many times you can masturbate in the bathroom in one day. University pals snorkel in the ocean of a far off tropical land, while you snorkel your way through the excessive volume of bullshit your colleagues pass around the office each day like hapless dung beetles. For your tanned and joyous friends “the three S’s“ means sun, sea and sex; for you they mean stuffy, spiritless and stereotypical city wankers’ arses you are forced to wipe for two months as you wonder where the glorious innocence of youth has disappeared.

Still, at least she hasn’t resorted to Tumblr…

If this lifestyle is the sort you yearn for, fear not – your time will come. If your ambitions and lifelong dreams extend as far as becoming an irrelevant cog in a big name bank and working twice as hard for half the pay you should be earning – then fine.

But I beg of you, please give your youth a chance. Attending university presents the unique opportunity of a few precious long summers that are your own. To maximize this potential, admittedly you need money to spend; internships are usually unpaid and sap the intern of any resources for travel or pleasure for the rest of the summer.

Oh, for what life could have been!

Why anyone voluntarily signs themselves up for two months of unpaid depression, in the faint hope it will boost their future income by half a percent, is beyond me. The burdensome chains of employment will come soon enough.

From my office chair, I’d rather not be harking back to those long summer months when I used to sit on the interns chair on the other side of the same office. “Ah this reminds me of the time when I didn’t know where the stapler was during my footloose and fancy free university summers as an intern.” Oh how the office characters will love my tales of youth.

Just yawn.