As many of you know, since last July I have been working for the Library of Congress Junior Fellows 2013 Internship. Today I received an email that very simply stated:
Dear: Junior Fellow Intern Applicant
You submitted an application for Junior Fellow Summer Intern 2013, at the Library of Congress. We appreciate your interest in this position, however another candidate was selected.
To access other employment opportunities at the Library of Congress, please visit WWW.LOC.GOV
I have read this email at least a dozen times since receiving it at 1:03 this afternoon. Going into the application process, I figured I had a slim chance if any. People around me suggested my chances were greater than that. I believed them.
They may be right -- maybe I was in the last batch of applicants. Right now, it just hurts.
Just hours before I was saying to my boyfriend that I had not yet heard from the Library of Congress but I would, any day now, get a phone call to schedule an interview. I never made it to the interview process. I will never know what it was I did wrong. I will never have a chance to defend myself. And it hurts.
I have back up plans, of course, but none of them are very appealing. Fewer of those opportunities pay than don't pay which is a huge issue as tuition recently increased and I'm going into my last year of undergrad. A lot of people have just said, "Oh, just go work at McDonald's for another summer -- it won't kill you." The thing is, it will. Working at McDonald's, for me, is incredibly depressing. It's repetitive and frequently degrading. While the work there is good work and it pays, I have outgrown the position. I can take orders in my sleep while bagging salad dressing. I am ready for something more and have been for some time. Returning to McDonald's will kill my soul. It is not that I am "too good" for McDonald's, as many of you may be inclined to comment. I am simply not challenged there anymore and I cannot remain in a place that does not challenge me. To stay in a place that does not challenge me would result in no personal growth, which is akin to death.
Other back up plans involve waiting on hearing back from internships. I don't feel like I'm a particularly good writer, nor do I feel like I am very good at anything else.
Also, at this point, I would like to acknowledge and recognize that this is a rather self-indulgent post. That said, I hope others in the same position will at least feel that they are not alone and maybe even, by the end, inspired to move on. I am not writing this post for pity. I am aware that my readership tends to be low so forgive me if, for once, I do something for myself.
After reading my rejection today, I looked into other possible internships in the area. What is most frustrating is that I am not qualified for many of these internships. This is utterly ridiculous. So many of these internships require experience in such-and-such, but isn't gaining experience what internships are supposed to be about? I suppose it's reasonable to expect some know-how when it comes to basic computer applications, but to expect knowledge of HTML and customer service? While I personally own both of these skills, there are plenty of skills out there that I have no experience with and part of my motivation for obtaining an internship is to gain these very skills. Companies and organizations are hurting themselves in this -- by narrowing their potential applicant pool, they lose many valuable potential applicants, even if these applicants do not know how to code.
Hire Me Image courtesy of Manipal Blog.
I Don't Care Image courtesy of Pulp Factor.
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