I'm 26F gonna be graduating from college in the upcoming semester and I have an unpaid internship. I think mine is just particularly sucky as well, I'm being treated like crap. Anything that I bring to the table is ripped to shreds and they completely devalue my time outside of them. What happened today is just unbelievably disrespectful as well and indicative of the absolute buffoonery of this place.
I had a meeting with them from 12:30-1:30 pm today (which is a time period I've told them many times, I am unavailable due to class). I ended up just being able to go today because I got lucky that class was canceled. In the meeting I told them that this is a very busy time for me, as I have a campaign project due Monday, an exam, and an essay due on Friday. They told me that I needed to complete a press release for them so that I would be able to show it to an expert that they were bringing in for a meeting at 4pm today.
So, I created this practice press release for them since I'll have the opportunity to show it to what they describe as an expert and get some feedback, which is great. (By the way the thing they want me creating the press release for doesn't even exist yet.) I then showed up to the meeting and sat halfway through it while they went over a different press release from 6 months ago and got feedback from the expert on that.
I unmuted and asked them if I could share mine since I had taken both the time to create this press release and come to the meeting when I had already stated to them that I needed to be focusing on schoolwork. I was then told by the founder that “we are spending valuable time with our expert, and we already spent too much time on press releases” and then paraphrasing here that I can share it with them in a separate meeting and then if they think it's “good enough” I can email it to the expert and get their feedback after that.
Then they had this expert look at a flyer (a “comparison” flyer, those ones that are like “us” with a bunch of checkmarks, and “the competition” with a bunch of x's), that they made for the next 15 minutes. I sent my contact an email saying I had somewhere else to be while I just cried and got angry about being treated this way.
I just feel so disrespected since I took the time to not only make them this press release for a thing that doesn't exist, and then spent 45 min in a meeting that I was told my presence was necessary to get feedback on the press release I made only to be told to just basically fuck off, instead of focusing on my exams and future.
And I'm not even being paid to deal with them or to create all of this free work that I am doing for them. Unpaid internships are just a way to force educated people into positions where they are pissed on for no reason other than that they don't have that magical piece of paper that makes their time valuable yet. I actually put effort and care into this organization and the people there and those they say they help and I don't even get the basic respect of hey, hope your studying goes well, or literally any other response other than this.