Then I learned about the Revolution Prep Ivy Summer Management Program from a card slid under my door. The program described itself as “an elite entrepreneurial internship program that selects exceptional undergraduates from the nation’s top universities to launch and grow their own test-prep businesses for a summer.” Pretty high falutin’ language. To be honest, I was skeptical. I didn’t exactly have the highest opinion of the test-prep industry and this was the first time I had heard of the company. But I had done some tutoring before and enjoyed it, had always wanted to run my own business and needed a job for the summer, so I figured I would give it a shot.
Long story short, I really enjoyed my summer with the program. I earned $32,500 in revenue and $14,800 in profits and bonuses (take-home pay) and raised my 47 students’ ACT scores by about four points on average (the equivalent of about 260 points on the SAT). But at the risk of sounding cheesy or cliche, money wasn’t the most valuable thing I earned that summer, nor were my acquired “transferable skills in sales, marketing, and operations.” Rather, the version of myself I found while making that money and acquiring those skills was the most valuable thing I earned.
I went into the summer with fairly low expectations for my branch, primarily because I had fairly low expectations of myself. I had always been the smart slacker, the guy always trying to game the system, the one who tried to score a 92.5 with the least possible amount of work. I’d worked full-time every summer since the 8th grade and occasionally part-time during the year and had never been a big fan of my jobs. I had been a solid employee, but nothing special. I thought the problem was an inherent shortcoming of work ethic.
I was wrong — I realized that about myself when I started voluntarily working 70 and 80-hour weeks, going five weeks without a day off and reading about teaching methods during my free time. I also gave free extra tutoring to the students that were struggling, because I felt a powerful need to come through for them. And I enjoyed it.
The problem hadn’t been a lack of work ethic, but rather apathy. For whatever reason, I found meaning in teaching, in talking to parents and answering their questions, in building a business. I hadn’t had this sort of meaning in a while or even realized that it had been missing until I found it. Being genuinely invested in something will do strange things to your work ethic without your even realizing it. That isn’t to say that there won’t be long weeks, stressful situations or times when you hate going to work. But long-term, a great job or internship will always lift you up rather than grind you down.
You can always point out the doctors who were really meant to be doctors or the lawyers that were really meant to be lawyers. They bring a type of quiet skill and passion to their work that’s difficult to fake. But it’s not just a matter of being good at something or of liking the work itself; i.e. a huge part of a job or internship that’s right for you is that it allows you to be someone you genuinely like and are proud of. We’re all different people in different situations. In some situations we thrive, while in other situations we become someone we wish we weren’t. And you want something on which you spend 40 or more hours every week to be one of the former.
I think a lot of times, in our haste to pad our resumes, earn money or build our skill sets, we overlook the most valuable benefit of an internship: to simply let us know whether or not we enjoy that type of work without the commitment of a full-time job. The most important benefit of an internship, though, is to let us know whether or not we like the people that we become when doing that work. Internships let us take a version of ourselves for a test drive.
People often describe great experiences, jobs and internships included, as “transformative.” While I know what they mean, I respectfully disagree. I don’t think these experiences actually transform us. I think they simply allow us to be the person we’ve been inside all along and make us feel good about being that person. A good internship provides work we can lose ourselves in. But the great ones — that’s work we can find ourselves in.
John Burford is a anthropology major from Shreveport, La. He can be reached at jburford@princeton.edu.
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