Ready to return: Tech tops job

I’ve spent enough time at Tech to know that most students here have a love/hate relationship with the school.

I mean this in two ways: either sometimes you love it and sometimes you hate it, or it loves to torture you, and you hate it. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

I’ve experienced both.

I don’t think I need to go into details, as I’d simply be rehashing experiences that I hold in common with just about every student at Tech.

So why do I bring this up at all? Well, I’ve recently gotten a whole new perspective on the whole “hate” aspect of the love/hate relationship I have with Tech—and maybe a little on the “love” part, too. I’ve spent this semester working a full-time internship, trying to get a feel for what I might want to do with my life once Tech is through with me.

Internships, as a nebulous concept, are terrific for getting work experience, discovering your strengths and learning what you like to do. On the flip side, they’re also highly useful for devising new and innovative ways to waste time, discovering your weaknesses and learning what you hate doing.

In other words, they inspire a love/hate relationship all their own.

I’ve spent my internship exploring both sides of this coin, though I would say I’ve gained more from the latter side than the former in this particular experience.

Don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t been an entirely negative experience—quite the contrary, in fact. The people I worked with on a daily basis are a great bunch and have helped me on many levels with how I relate to others.

I also found that I’m good at research and providing useful information to others and that I enjoy providing technical support a lot more than I ever realized.

Unfortunately, very little of that had any bearing on the actual responsibilities of my job. In fact, I would say that my job didn’t particularly involve many responsibilities at all, which strangely made me bristle a little.

Here’s where I get to the philosophical nitty-gritty of this whole love/hate relationship thing.

At Tech, I love it when I take a class that doesn’t hold me to a high level of responsibility (they happen…occasionally…)—it’s a nice break from the rest of my classes, which are often the intellectual equivalent of hitting my head repeatedly against a brick wall.

At my job, on the other hand, I hate being held to a low level of responsibility—it provides me with absolutely no motivation to do, well, anything really.

It could be said that responsibility in the classroom provides motivation just as responsibility on the job does, and I can’t argue with that.

It just happens to be that in one setting I enjoy being able to slack off and in another it bothers me to no end.

During my stint working in the “real world,” I’ve also discovered that some of the things that I really dislike about Tech look pretty insignificant next to some of the things I really disliked about working in the setting that I have been for the past few months. I never thought I’d say this, but at this point I’d take a TA who doesn’t speak English over an out-of-touch bureaucrat any day.

As much as I’d like to boil this down to specific gripes and examples, I won’t.

For one, they aren’t pertinent to the greater lesson I’ve learned (which is, for those of you who don’t read between the lines, that as bad as I think Tech can be sometimes, the real world can be worse), and for another, they’d be a dead giveaway as to where I worked, and I don’t want to do that because for as much as I know that the kind of work I did is not for me, there are others who know just as much that it is for them.

That said, I wouldn’t want to put anyone off from trying it if they were thinking about it.

In the end, I find myself walking away from my internship with a nice entry on my resume and a great sigh of relief that it’s over.

I would recommend taking an internship (or a co-op, though I can’t really speak much to that) to anyone.

It not only provides opportunity and direction but also a huge shift in perspective—so much so that I’m actually looking forward to taking classes again. In fact, I think I might put off graduating for awhile because staying at Tech is looking a lot better now than being an office monkey.