A humbling summer

For my summer internship in broadcast journalism, I wore crisp shirts, pressed skirts, and high heels to do all sorts of things Princeton has prepared me for, such as photocopying, making phone calls and scampering between cars at red lights.

"Excuse me, sir," I said, pointing my microphone at a driver eating wonton soup. "How do you feel about the housing market?"

Twenty years of ambition, hopes, and achievement came down to this: transcribing tapes of Russians with barely intelligible English, cringing in an operating room as surgeons sliced up a foot, standing in a downpour and asking Kmart shoppers if they would buy from a criminal Martha Stewart (overwhelmingly, yes). As I spent an entire morning dealing with a broken collate button, a reporter gave me a pat on the back. "We're all doing less than we're capable here," he said. "But at least we love our jobs."

After years of undeserved condescension because my parents are obvious immigrants, then years of equally undeserved "respect" because I am an obvious nerd, I was back on the bottom again. I was underling of the underlings, a typo on a reporter's monitor, the lint on an anchor's blazer — scrambling to do whatever the big shots couldn't — or didn't want to — do because they were in makeup. They were on air. They were out to lunch. At any rate, they were Important and I was Not, so hurry up with finding that interview clip! (Yes, right away.)

Once I read aloud from The Economist for an hour into a payphone, claiming it for a courtroom reporter while a red-faced CNN guy growled, "You can't do that!"

Oh, yes I can.

I may have no salary and no real skills to speak of, but I sure can carry on a fake phone conversation, ad infinitum in fact. I will not let you down, employer, family, Princeton.

While my internship did not help me clarify my career goals, it did help me recognize an unfortunate sense of entitlement in myself, a sense that crept up last week when I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the grime off my bathroom floor. "No one likes it, but someone has to do it," I thought. "What makes you too good to be that person? Just who do you think you are?"

Oh, right. Deep down, I think I deserve to be handed choice jobs, money, respect — things others have to earn — on a silver platter for the rest of my life. I think I am too good to be an underling. "Here's your reward for those awesome SAT scores you got when you were 16. And those college essays — those were pretty awesome too. Live long and prosper, Princetonian!"

This is the year that many in my class will apply for jobs. While some of us will see that silver platter, others will toil at the very bottom like anyone else — a fact I am starting to appreciate. Maybe getting out into the real world will do us some good, shake up our sense of entitlement, make us work as we never worked before. I used to be a smug, overpraised teenager who got away with everything. This summer I was a lowly intern, transcribing tapes about blue cheese, and now I'm just a college senior, waking up to find ants crawling on my arm.

During my last week of work, the news desk took the interns out for goodbye drinks and dinner. As I became somewhat drunk on martinis that I'm not old enough to drink, one of the producers remarked, "Now that you have connections, you might be able to get a job here. It's very, very competitive, and you're paid ten dollars an hour to give tours of the building for three months. Then a select few are chosen to move up. It's a test of dedication."

"Great," I said with my best smile. Then I had another martini. Julie Park is an English major from Wayne, N.J. She can be reached at jypark@princeton.edu.