When You Don't Get What You Want

When I was in college, I wanted to write professionally for Essence magazine after I graduated. Imagine my delight when I found out that the Amerian Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) had a magazine internship program for rising college seniors, and one of the participating magazines was Essence magazine! I was sure that I was going to be matched with Essence if I got the internship. I thought it couldn't have turned out any other way.  I got one of the internships . . . and I was placed with Parents magazine. 

Talk about mixed emotions. I was ready to transition away from the civil servant positions I had the previous summers. One summer I worked for the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and while I made good friends there (I LOVED working with Tanane, Michelle, Sherry [who SO reminded me of my childhood friend, Kaisha] and Tanya), and loved working in the World Trade Center (6 World Trade), the work was purely administrative. We lived in Brooklyn Heights then, and I walked to work over the Brooklyn Bridge most days. That was also very cool. The following summer, I worked for the Equal Employment Officer of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  I got to work in 6 World Trade again, but not with another group of folks my age like at CPSC. The EEO was always traveling, so I was alone a lot, and he didn't leave me with much to do. I spent a lot of time riding the elevators in 1 and 2 World Trade, window shopping in the mall under the World Trade Center, and writing stories.

Side Note: This is a big part of the reason why the World Trade Center will play a prominent role in my novel. I spent a lot of time there, not only during those two summers but during a subsequent summer when I worked a few blocks away from the WTC for the Summer Youth Employment Program. I'd sit by the fountain pictured here during my lunch breaks sometimes, and listening to the jazz concerts and other performances. 6 WTC is at the back right side of this picture. 

Back to the summer before my senior year - I realized that I wanted to move on to doing something creative, connected to what I saw myself doing once I graduated, and that would also allow me to explore my African American culture. That wasn't going to happen that summer.  I don't know what I thought entry level/intern work would be like at a magazine, but fact checking was not fun. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I was interested in what I was fact checking, but I spent a lot of time on the phone with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and they happened to be producing the big toy issue which required a TON of fact checking. To top it all off, the interns got together weekly, I think, to talk about our intern experiences, and it felt like a punch in the gut each time I saw the Essence intern and heard all about her wonderful experiences. I wanted to meet Susan Taylor! She was the former editor-in-chief of Essence, and I saw her picture every month - Essence was like oxygen to me when I was at school in Big Sandy, Texas!

As I mentioned before, I'm not one for regrets, but sometimes I wish I could do that internship over. In addition to never quite getting over not being assigned to Essence, I don't think Parents was quite prepared to provide enough work for an intern, so the person who was assigned to supervise me gave me SO MUCH GRUNT WORK!! She had me make copies of a section of years of magazines and put them in a binder. She said the project was urgent. When I was done, the binders just sat on her floor unused, which made it extra hard when I was in her office once and saw a note on her desk that said I was a freeloader. The woman in the picture with me is one of the Assistant Editors, I believe, who tried to invest in me while I was there. I think her name was Wendy. I wish I had focused more on my relationship with her.

Now, I admit . . . I was not happy to be there, and I did have some stereotypical civil servant ways about me. I did get upset that they told me they wouldn't pay me overtime . . . and then I realized that I didn't understand that they meant no time and a half, which isn't what I wanted anyway. As a culminating project, all of the interns contributed articles to our own little magazine. I wrote an article called Advice from a Freeloader where I vented about my experience. I wish I had known that ASME planned to gift the magazine to the editors. Oops . . . I sure did not know how to network and avoid burning bridges. 

Anyway, I wish I would have had a better attitude, even if I didn't get what I wanted. I know that working for a magazine isn't what I was destined for. I couldn't be happier with the work I'm doing now. I didn't have that foresight when I was 20. I can definitely use my intern experience as I shape the characters in my novel - healthy ways to deal with not getting what you want, and not such effective ways.