Washington D.C. in the summer months becomes more like Washington D. I. (the District of Interns).  Going to work in the morning on the Metro reveals large swaths of college age, well-dressed, people, on their way to the heart of the city.  If there is any doubt that these are interns, one only needs to look at their badges (governmental interns receive an identifiable “intern” badge) or listen in to their conversations.  Often times interns travel in friend groups, or work groups, headed to the same place.  In either case, they will often talk to each other about the kinds of work they are doing in so-and-so’s office or for this-or-that agency while on leave from their various universities and colleges located around the country.

Noticing these large groups of people one is forced to wonder: why intern?  Is it the great pay and glamorous lifestyle?  No, that surely can’t be it.  Most people could likely make more working a summer job back home.  The fact that we are all riding a dirty metro displays that there is little glamour in the whole thing.  Is it the ability to put this on the resume for better chances at future employment?  This is indeed a perk, however, having an internship on your resume does surely not guarantee a job position.  In addition, one could likely have a very good looking resume going out into the workfield without ever doing an internship.  Is it the experience of it?  This seems like a much closer answer to the truth, but maybe not in the traditional sense of experience.

The answer that I have come to accept is experience in a kind of “trial and error” sense.  By this, I mean we intern to test out certain theories of what environment we want to work in or what kind of work we want to be doing.  At Valpo, the word “vocation” is thrown about often, forcing you to start thinking about what this may mean for you fairly early on in your college career.  Where do you belong?  Where does your passion lie?  In essence, what do you want to do for the large majority of the rest of your life.  No pressure.

Throughout one’s college career we develop theories of what we want to be doing and what we will enjoy, however, we rarely acknowledge that these are only theories.  Once we decide on a passion and ideal career trajectory, it is easy to forget that this is largely unbased.  We have never actually tried doing this kind of work for 40 hours, 5 days, a week.  In this way, it is like a question that we forget is a question.  We assume we know the answer because we think we know ourselves, but in reality this is something that needs to be proven.  Do we actually know ourselves as well as we think we do?

This, then, is where internships come in.  Internships provide a relatively safe, temporal, chance to test out a career in the real world.  If you like it, as you thought you would, you get a sense of satisfaction.  You now have proof that the trajectory you see yourself on is the one for you.  This opens up new questions though, of more specifics.  Now that you know what the work you want to do is, you must figure out in what way you want to enter into this field and in what capacity you want to work.

However, there is also an alternative response to an internship. It might be that you end up having a rude awakening, that what you assumed would be your ideal career may be less than ideal.  This, while it can be momentarily jarring, is actually just as helpful to your self and career development.  This teaches you that you need to go back to the drawing board, come up with a new theory, and test it again.

This is how the life of the intern is truly a process of questioning, questions being answered, and this answer somehow always leading to more questioning  Once this is realized, though, there is a sense of solidarity on the morning Metro ride.  Yes, all us interns may be doing different kinds of work and may be at different points in our lives, but we are still trying to all answer the same questions, and in the end, we will all get one of the same two answers.  Whatever the answer may be at the end, we are all learning critical things about ourselves as people and, in the case of CAPS fellow, workers for social justice.