The Devil Wears Urban Outfitters

Official Definition of an Internship (According to Dictionary.com)

in·tern·ship, [in-turn-ship] noun

Any official or formal program to provide practical experience for beginners in an occupation or profession

My Definition of an Internship

A period of time in which a twentysomething works for free with no promise of it ever turning into a paid position. Duties include working for someone who is only a year older than you and bringing them coffee, Luna bars, and the occasional Valium. Must know how to photocopy and organize large piles of paper while giving the impression to your boss that you are living the dream!

I first became familiar with the concept of internships from watching The Hills—a life-altering reality TV show that followed Lauren Conrad, a beautiful and wealthy high school graduate, as she left behind the sandy cocaine beaches of Laguna Beach for Los Angeles to work a very prestigious internship at Teen Vogue. When Lauren found out she got the gig, she acted so excited you would think she had landed a paid position. It was going to be amazing! Her life would never be the same! Move over Diane von Furstenberg. LC’s putting on one of her funky headbands and taking over!

When Lauren first came into the Teen Vogue offices, the employees prepared her as if she were meeting the pope when she was really just meeting Lisa Love, the West Coast editor in chief. In one truly bizarre scene, they even restyled her outfit so she could look more chic and “Teen Vogue appropriate.” All this effort proved to be for naught, because Lauren ended up doing jack shit at the magazine. She just sat around a room that looked like a set and gossiped about boys with her fellow intern, Whitney “Just Say No to Having Emotions” Port. Occasionally Lisa Love would make her do something pressing like fly to New York to drop off a dress, but other than that, the whole thing looked like a fake snoozefest. By the end of the series, Lauren had moved on to selling her own cocktail dresses and developing a fashion line for Kohl’s while still pretending to live the life of a struggling intern on TV. It was so rude! You can’t expect viewers to believe your job is fetching coffee when you’re selling a $300 dress called the Audrina.

Even though Lauren Conrad’s experience was inauthentic, I was hooked on the idea of interning myself. In the late 2000s, interning had morphed into its own strangely elitist culture, thanks to movies like The Devil Wears Prada, which glamorized working for a sadist on a nonexistent salary. College students everywhere were eager to be abused by some bossy bitch in Isabel Marant because it made us feel accomplished and deluded us into thinking that after putting up with someone’s bullshit for an entire summer, we would be guaranteed a job.

This turned out to be laughably untrue. Despite the occasional exception, internships are primarily used by employers to get free labor—especially by the cash-strapped industries I was interested in working in, like publishing. If you do decide to intern (and let’s be honest: there isn’t much of a choice), you must go into it with no expectations. Just try to get as much experience as you can, make a connection with one of your employers so you can use them as a future reference, and get the fuck out. You are there simply to give your résumé some padding and hope/pray that another company with a bigger budget will be impressed enough to give you an entry-level position.

The summer after my accident, I got my first internship with a website called Popsense, which was a tiny pop culture blog run by two twenty-year-old juniors at NYU. I was older than my bosses—a reality that isn’t that uncommon in blogging jobs—but I didn’t care. I was so desperate to beef up my anorexic résumé I would’ve picked up dog shit for Suri Cruise. Eugene Lang placed such an importance on internships that I feared I was already falling behind in the rat race. I felt so unaccomplished next to sophomores who would casually rattle off all their internships in class. “Yeah, so I first started interning at sixteen for Harper’s and then I landed at McSweeney’s and now I’m at Vogue. So I’m, like, on a really good track right now.” What the hell? When I was a freshman in college, I was watching Six Feet Under in my dorm room with the covers over my head and pretending I had a coke problem. Once, at a party in Los Angeles, I met an intern who was only fourteen years old. I wanted to say to her, “Honey, just go home, pick your zits in the mirror, and call some boys on the telephone. You don’t need to do this yet.”

But maybe she actually did! The recession hit when I was a junior, and we all scrambled to get any job experience we could before graduating. Since most of my classmates were wealthy to begin with, they could afford to work for no pay for six months. Internships were designed for people like them. They come with an entry fee that rewards the rich and penalizes those who don’t have the luxury to work twenty-five hours a week for free while going to school full-time. To work for no money, you must have money to begin with.

Which brings me to my scarlet letter: m for malpractice! When I was born a gimp instead of an able-bodied princess, my parents sued my delivery doctor and won me a settlement of money I would receive when I was eighteen. Without this little nest egg, I could have never afforded to live in a city like New York or even intern. Are you kidding? People whose parents file for bankruptcy don’t get to intern. That lawsuit was a damn miracle, and I had to take advantage of it. If I just did nothing and got mediocre grades and sat around, I would officially be the worst person ever. (I would also be broke in a few years, because I didn’t get that much money.)

I ended up working at Popsense for a month and a half before I left to have another surgery on my arm. By the time the fall rolled around, I was fully recovered and landed a part-time gig at a more legitimate website, Flavorwire. This time I was actually paid ten dollars a post, sometimes twenty if it got a lot of traffic. I was in heaven getting paid to write! I felt so much pride cashing those checks for ten dollars—never mind that each post took me two to three hours to write and format, making the payment less than minimum wage. It felt like I was on the path to success.

In December of 2009, I graduated from college and quit Flavorwire to look for a full-time paid writing position, but of course, that didn’t work out. New York was still deep-throating the recession and squeezing its balls. There were no jobs for anyone. I was secretly relieved to be unemployed for a little while, though. The prospect of finding work left me paralyzed with fear because I wasn’t sure I could even physically survive in the workplace. Wherever I ended up I would have to start from the bottom and do lots of administrative tasks—and with my bum hand and brain, accomplishing something as simple as opening an envelope could take me ten minutes. Trust me, babe. You don’t want me to open your mail. Bad things will happen.

To mask my disability to employers, I applied for internships that gave you the option to work remotely. I never once stepped into an office. (Though, to be fair, I think Popsense was operated out of someone’s dorm room.) I knew I couldn’t do this forever, though. If I ever wanted to work in print, or at a legitimate blog, I would need to go into an office and sit side by side with someone. I would have to do simple tasks, tasks that could take an able-bodied person five seconds but possibly hours for me.

I would have to find an internship at a prestigious print magazine.

A few months after I graduated, I was sitting at home watching YouTube videos of Mary-Kate Olsen trying to speak when I saw that one of my favorite magazines, Interview, was looking for summer interns. “This is your moment, Ryan!” I thought. “Pick up your confidence that you keep locked in that storage unit in Queens and apply, dammit!” So I did it—I drove to Queens, got my confidence out of storage (it had grown considerably since I’d seen it last, thank God), and applied for the internship. A few days after submitting my résumé, I got a response back asking me to come in for an interview at their intimidating office in SoHo.

Vibrating with excitement, I picked out my best “I am not disabled; I am NEW YORK MEDIA!” outfit and hightailed it downtown to meet with Grace, one of the editors, for a sit-down chat. Grace seemed nice enough, but she did look a bit worn down. It seemed like this job had stolen her spirit and was keeping it hostage in the cat food aisle at Rite Aid. The way she carried herself and the cadence in her voice gave me the impression that the world was perpetually taking a giant dump on her face—a glamorous, couture dump, but a dump nonetheless. Despite her sad vibes, the two of us got along nicely and I felt confident that I had aced the interview.

When Grace called me a few days later and said that I had gotten the internship, I was overjoyed and then immediately terrified. This wasn’t a touchy-feely “We understand your brain damage!” magazine. It was an avant-garde New York FASHUN publication that represented physical perfection, and here I was, ready to limp all over it.

It only took thirty minutes into my first day at work to realize that, disabled or not, it was going to be nearly impossible to get a real job at the magazine. Grace was giving me a tour of the office (“This is where you cry after a long day,” “This is where you get told you’re a retard by your chic power lesbian boss”) when, all of a sudden, a flustered assistant came rushing up to her.

“Grace, we need a new magazine rack. The ones we have are falling apart!”

“Are you kidding me?” Grace scoffed. “We can’t afford that.”

“Um, they’re, like, five dollars. I’ll just pay for it.”

“Okay, fine. You pay.”

The assistant slumped away, and Grace continued on with her tour. “This is the Ping-Pong table that no one ever uses because we’re not allowed to have fun here . . .” (She wasn’t actually saying these things but she might as well have with the way she was delivering the information.) I was shocked. How could this magazine ever afford to hire me if they couldn’t even afford a five-dollar magazine rack? Weren’t magazines supposed to have money? The office might’ve been glamorous and the editor in chief was some globe-trotting Anna Wintour–type, but apparently everyone else who worked there was hanging on by a thread—emotionally, spiritually, and financially.

One such person was Hannah, a twenty-four-year-old assistant to the entertainment editor, with whom I worked closely. Since Grace was often crying in a broom closet somewhere, I relied on Hannah to give me things to do. The second I met her, I went into overdrive by sending her pitch after pitch—one of which was a fashion editorial inspired by the Manson family that I don’t think went over well. Hannah was sweet, though. She listened to my ideas and encouraged me to scout new music they could possibly feature in the magazine. I did as I was told, flooding her in-box with weird bands that I thought were going to hit it big and creating mini-bios for each group. Hannah took all of these into consideration and immediately got the vibe that I was a hungry tiger. She was calling me by my nickname “Rye” the second day.

It was important to make my presence known at Interview so I could set myself apart from the other interns—one of whom I swear to God was South African royalty. That happens a lot at internships. You’re always working with someone who’s an heiress or whose parents are famous. I have no idea why the wealthy even bother interning in the first place. Maybe they’re just looking for ways to kill time before they can marry a wealthy guy named Tad who works in finance and wants to do anal on his birthday.

I was never going to get noticed at Interview for my photocopying abilities, so the only other way to make an impression was to showcase my story ideas. This worked in my favor most of the time, until Hannah snapped at me one day and said, “You need to focus less on pitches and fulfill more of your intern duties!” She was absolutely right. I wasn’t really doing any of the typical intern work, but that’s because I was laughably bad at it. She quickly realized this when, after she ordered me to do the thing I feared most—open mail—I spent thirty minutes trying to work the letter opener and ended up ripping the contents of the envelope. Sheepishly, I walked up to Hannah, torn envelope in my hand, and apologized for the mistake. She looked annoyed but, sensing the humiliation that was practically radiating from my pores, she took pity on me. “It’s okay, Rye,” she smiled. “Why don’t you go uptown to Bret Easton Ellis’s hotel and drop off this manuscript for me?”

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I thought that if Hannah called me by my nickname and gave me positive affirmations, I would somehow get a job. But nothing could’ve gotten me a job at Interview. I could’ve been braiding my boss’s hair and married into the family and it still wouldn’t have translated to a paycheck. It wasn’t anything personal against me. There was just no money to go around. The people who were actually salaried usually ended up doing two jobs for little money. In fact, for the three months I was there, the editorial assistant left to go work at another magazine and instead of immediately hiring someone to fill the position, they had an intern do the job for free. At first, the intern was overjoyed. “Yes!” they thought. “This could be my ticket to getting a real job here.” But after months of hard work for no pay, they fired the intern and had someone outside the company fill the position.

As much as I wanted to be offered a job, I left Interview disillusioned with the magazine world. Everyone came here to be a part of something they saw on TV, but the reality didn’t come close to matching up with the fantasy. The fashion department was especially keen on making their job feel very tortured and glamorous. One day I came into work and an intern rushed up to tell me some “delicious drama.”

“Oh my God, you won’t believe what happened yesterday!”

“What?”

“A big fashion stylist stopped by the office and went on a rampage. He threw a shoe at an intern’s head!” This person seemed positively delighted by this news.

“That’s fucked-up.”

“I know, right? So nuts!” the intern gushed, smiling.

“No, really. You shouldn’t be allowed to treat people that way. I don’t care how important you are. That’s unacceptable.”

“I mean, yeah, I guess. I think it’s kind of major, though, to get a shoe thrown at your head by someone that famous.”

Excuse me, hon? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY GENERATION?

On my last day at Interview, I had an awkward conversation with Grace and Hannah about my overall job performance that summer. I had finally wised up and was not expecting anything from them. I just wanted to get out of there with my dignity intact. Before I could do that, though, I needed to sit through this conversation of how I was an invaluable part of the team and should really keep in touch. It seemed to me like there was an elephant in the room and that elephant was the fact that I wasn’t getting a job. Maybe I was expecting too much, but it did seem strange that it wasn’t even being addressed. Finally, I just asked them.

“So, what would I need to do to, like, get a job here?”

Their necks stiffened. It felt like I had just said a curse word: j*b.

“Oh, um . . .” Hannah shuffled uncomfortably in her Free People peasant top. “You know, we’re not really hiring anyone right now, but you should definitely keep in touch with our online editor. You could write more stuff for the site!”

Yeah. For free. Everything is for free. With writing, it’s an achievement just to be published, which is something I’ve never understood. Why can’t writers expect to get paid, and why is it considered taboo to even bring up the issue of money? In every other industry, you expect payment for your work. You don’t have plumbers being like, “YES, I’ll unclog your pipes! Thank you for this blessed opportunity. No payment necessary!” Perhaps writers are so willing to work for no money because there’s an inherent shame about doing something creative, especially during a time when people are lucky to be working at all. Or maybe we’re all just masochists who don’t know our own worth.

I had already written for Interview’s website and didn’t see any point in continuing to work for free. If anything, I would try to diversify as much as possible and try to write somewhere else for no money. I didn’t tell Hannah and Grace that, though. I just thanked them for the opportunity and said my good-byes. Before I could leave, Grace told me she had a present for me and led me to her office. She then went underneath her desk and took out a box that was loaded to the brim with children’s toys.

“Every intern gets a toy when they leave, and I think I have the perfect one for you!” Grace started rummaging through the box, bypassing Magic Markers and coloring books.

“Oh, here it is!” Grace’s face was beaming. She had found the appropriate gift for me: a bright pink Etch A Sketch.

“Wow,” I said, genuinely shocked. “I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

“I know; isn’t it funny?”

When I got home, I threw the Etch A Sketch in my closet next to my college diploma, where it belonged. Then I began my months-long stretch of not having a job. Whoever coined the word “funemployment” really needs to lose their job. You don’t spend all your time with your friends drinking boxed wine and watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Your existence is solitary and joyless. You wake up every day feeling immediate dread that you haven’t landed something yet. Then you spend hours looking for jobs on the computer. You find yourself applying to anything, things you don’t know the first thing about and certainly aren’t qualified for, because you’re desperate, because you’re panicked, because you don’t know what else to do. All the while, you have to contend with the fact that just last year, you were living life like it was golden. You were set up for a good future. You did everything right. (If this all sounds naïve and lacking perspective, maybe it’s because when you graduate from college, you’re naïve and lack perspective.)

Being unemployed is its own full-time job. There’s never any true relief. You’re always looking for a gig or some unseen opportunity. Meanwhile, there’s no escaping the fact that you have no job. It follows you wherever you go. You can’t even go on the Internet for a nice distraction, because you’ll most likely stumble on some trend piece about how fucked our generation is. The Internet is an overbearing dad wagging his finger in disapproval.

Some of us move back in with our parents. This can light a fire under your ass and make you start hustling to get a job so you can move out ASAP. Or it can make you sink further into complacency and depression. I have friends who moved back in with their parents after college and just never moved out. A temporary move turned into three years. Just like that. I don’t blame them. It’s hard to see the world as a land of opportunity from your parents’ basement.

I didn’t have to move back in with my parents, but that doesn’t mean I was living la vida loca when I was unemployed. In fact, I was having a terrible time because I didn’t feel like I deserved to experience joy. Every time I let my hair down and cut loose, I’d ask myself, “What have I done to earn this good time? NOTHING! Get a job and then you can have fun. Until then, you’re required to be sad.”

Being an unemployed postgrad is a modern-day Choose Your Own Adventure. You can be angry and wallow in a sea of entitlement believing that the world has failed you and it owes you something. But don’t act surprised when you find yourself not getting what you want. After my accident, I struggled with those pangs of resentment, too. I didn’t deserve to get hurt, especially after all I had been through already. When I graduated from college, those familiar feelings resurfaced. I thought, “I’m entitled to a job! I worked hard in school!” But then I realized I sounded like a churlish idiot and shut up and got to work. Getting angry at the world for your problems isn’t going to bring you any closer to a dream job or a relationship or whatever else you feel like you deserve. It’s going to keep you thousands of miles away from it.

A more effective way you can navigate the unemployed postgrad life is to be fearless. Most people who have achieved a modicum of success right after they graduated did it by being brave and laughing at anyone who told them no. In order to get anywhere, you have to ditch vanity and ego and just say to yourself, “I’m going to look like an idiot for the next few years because I have no idea what I’m doing, but that’s okay. That’s the only way I’ll learn.” I’ve noticed that a lot of my peers have paralyzing self-doubt when it comes to going after the things they want, whether it’s a job or a love interest. It makes me think that if you’re single, jobless, or both, it’s probably because you have a hard time believing you deserve otherwise.

I was having drinks recently with a friend and we were gossiping about an acquaintance of ours who had launched a Kickstarter to film a web series. The premise of the show sounded awful, and the video she made to plead her case was cringeworthy.

“She looks so ridiculous,” I snarled. “How could she have done that and thought she looked okay?”

My friend, who is less of a mean gossip girl than I am, said, “You know what? I agree that she looks totally stupid, but I also give her props for putting herself out there. At least she’s doing something. Think about all our friends who are unemployed or working at jobs they hate. They talk about all the things they’d like to do, but do they ever end up doing them? No. And that’s why people who make embarrassing Kickstarters will probably be more successful than the lazy people who have loads of talent. They’re actually doing it, and sometimes that’s all you need for things to happen.”

My friend was right. A week later, the Kickstarter got funded and our acquaintance quit her job to film the web series. I thought about all the people who, like me, had seen the Kickstarter and immediately sent it to their friends to mock her. They were probably bored at their horrible office job and perked up when they saw a chance to make fun of one of their peers. But who gets the last laugh in that situation? The person who is given the opportunity to do what they love or the insecure jerk who’s stuck in a cubicle?

Not giving a fuck about looking stupid is actually the smartest decision you could make, especially when you’re establishing yourself after college and have nothing to lose. The only way you can really escape unemployment hell is by taking some risks. Don’t be frightened. You can do it, babe! Don’t ever forget that Millennials are hustlers. We left school with no clear future and the traditional workplace in pieces, so we had to create our own jobs and build everything from our own intuition. That’s one thing twentysomethings don’t get enough credit for. The narrative is always “Millennials are bums who live with their parents”—which, fine, that contains an element of truth—but we’re also innovative freaks who have a remarkable ability to turn nothing into something.

A year after I graduated from college, I had four internships under my belt and only an Etch A Sketch to show for it. On my twenty-fourth birthday, I was set to start my fifth internship but never ended up going. Instead, I retreated into a writing cave for four months in the hope that something, anything, would happen. When I emerged, I had a full-time job and a ticket to a world even scarier than unemployment: the modern workplace.