[bangraman]

Work Experience... AKA "Internship". Basically an excuse for a company to get hold of cheap or free slave labour.


I was talking to the daughter of a friend of mine who had one of those nightmares. Not only was she given the task of clearing out the disgusting mess in various corners of the office, she had to fend off thinly veiled advances from senior members of staff. There was no work which had anything to do with the nature of the company (finance).


Fortunately at my Work Experience age, I was writing software for various businesses and doing quite nicely out of it... so I never had the 'Work Experience' hell. How about you?

 

[blip]

My best was at a union. I started off doing some odd work for the people in their politics department. Basic stuff like filing, issue research that kind of stuff. They liked my work, so they decided to put me in charge of tracking a few issue areas. My tracking was detailed enough that they decided to put me in the frontlines as an issue expert. Before I knew it, I was having private meetings with state senators and planning a chunk of the union's legislative strategy for that session. For the first time in my life, my work actually had a real impact. I played a significant role in saving the jobs of a number of workers and saving the state's budget several million over the next few years. I also got in WAY over my head and am still recovering from the stress of it all. I'm still amazed that the staff puts in that same level of intense work year-round. I've never seen so many dedicated people. Anyway, it definitely gave me something to think about.



My worst was with a social justice law firm. You see, the state had commissioned this study to determine if the poor were recieving adequate legal aid. The problem was that they didn't hire people to administer the study meaning that it was left to the law firms to do the leg-work of getting people to respond to the study. So me and one of the firm's lawyers ended up running around my home town trying to get low-income people to tell us about their legal problems. Unfortunately, our attempts almost always failed because the form that we had to use took 45 minutes to 2-hours for people to fill out! Everyone wanted to take our survery until they heard that little fact! It was really frustrating.

 

[Dusty Chalk]

Ugh.

Well, technically, that is preparing her for "life in the big city" -- too bad such unpleasantness is true. She should do something about it...like what? I don't know, I've never been in that situation. Sorry, plenty of lip service, no good advice.

 

[blessingx]

Four hours (before tossing in the towel) at a family style chicken restaurant. An hour of orientation (where his English and my Spanish didn’t help matters), two hours of cracking chicken bones to make the wings look "right", and a hour holding my forehead, after slipping in the freezer and cracking open my head.

That was not my best experience.