TL;DR: Having unpaid interns as a company in 2023 was the first of many red flags. Despite this, I’m a college freshman and internships look nice. Not to mention I have fun with my other intern friends (my title may be a little dramatic). Classes start soon, and I have applications in for a few different retail/sales jobs. I’m all good, but a little salty about the experience, just needed to get my issues with the place out of my system and this seemed like the most appropriate way.
So here’s the deal. I’m an unpaid intern at a broadcasting company. Nothing big name or whatever, just something smaller, local. The owner is in his eighties and he’s had some medical issues, so his daughter (my boss) pretty much runs everything. This family is incredibly rich. The owner just recently put his 2.5mil home up for sale, his grandkids are literal models, and my boss has accumulated her own small fortune on top of everything from her parents. But god forbid they pay us.
You’d think with no pay we’d have some pretty solid working conditions at least. Unfortunately not. Often we get asked to come in and the door is locked for at least five to ten minutes, or we’re asked to come in from this to that hour and then sent home early after being given no direction or task to fill the time we are there. More recently, my boss went out of town. She told all of us that we would be filming, and when I personally asked everyone as a group if we would film, they all confirmed. I had gotten some vaccines the day before, so I texted an employee (not an intern) and told him I couldn’t come in because I was feeling sore and a little sick. He told me it was okay because we weren’t filming. I assumed I was the only one out of the loop but another intern then texted the intern groupchat wanting to make sure everyone knew we weren’t filming after showing up himself, also out of the loop. None of us knew, and we all live 20-40 minutes out. This happened again yesterday. Boss needed a “catch-up day” as if she’s involved with filming. She only writes the scripts, which I don’t understand as it’s a task any of us could do if she’d just hand us a list of the topics to cover that day. Anyway, she told the intern that anchors an hour before filming, and didn’t tell the rest of us.
When she does delegate tasks to us, she does one of two things. She either does it herself without telling us or tells us she loves what we’ve done and then asks another intern to re-do it or just abandons the task altogether if she isn’t satisfied. This happened whenever she tasked me to coordinate our social media team. Boss wanted us to have a Tiktok, same username as the Instagram and for us to try to draw in followers. Once the four of us on said team got together and talked, I suggested that one intern create the profile, to which she agreed. I get a text later in the week from this intern: “Hey did you already make the Tiktok?” When I told her that I hadn’t and that I thought we had all agreed that she would do it, asked her if she still wanted to and told her I could if she needed, etc.: “I wanted to, but it seems like someone already did.” After some digging and looking at the account, we determined that our boss had made it. The user name wasn’t the same as our Instagram (it didn’t even look similar, which was part of her specific request), and all she was doing for followers was following her friends and then they would follow back, which makes us look unprofessional as a business account, imho. I have no idea why she chose to do this. We need 1000 followers to go live anyway, we didn’t even have anything that we needed to post, and we already have our Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube that need so much work, not to mention our website. She’s also not good with technology in general. She got a pop-up ad on her computer once, saying that it had a virus and she needed to call a certain number to fix it, and then genuinely asked our editor if she should call it. The first time I checked messages on the phone system (mind you they acquired this company over five years ago), she (president of the company) didn’t know the password. She wanted me to call the guys who installed the thing and ask them about it, and proceeds to give me the business card of that company’s vp. Not wanting to bother them and come off as unprofessional myself, I went back to the front desk, thought I’d try my luck and, sure enough, password was 1234.
She’s said some problematic things as well. I expressed to her that I was autistic before most of these things became prevalent. When I said that, I was met with “Well it doesn’t seem to be that much of a problem for you.” AND “I think [other intern] might be a little too.” On top of this, she recently did a controversial interview in which she told me and others that she would keep things neutral. I don’t want to give too much away, but she kept it anything except neutral. She also pushes religion heavily into the secular programming to the point where even an intern that had gone to a private Christian school seemed uncomfortable. She also told another intern that she has issues with some work I’ve done, but hasn’t brought that to my attention. A 40-50 year old woman talking about college-aged kids behind their back to other college-aged kids is prettty weird, especially in a workplace.
This company has been getting unpaid interns one after the other since 2020. And when I say “one after the other,” I mean we just had a girl leave and three days later had a new intern. And that makes five of us, which as much as I love my fellow interns, we don’t need. At this point just hire one as an anchor and the other as some type of office assistant, etc., for day to day work. We film for six hours a week or less and all of us have been getting less and less work on the side. At this point, it’s just Plan A, B, C, D, and E for if my boss needs to send an email she doesn’t want to send or if she needs someone to check the phones.
Alright, I’ve made this long enough now, I think paid or not we can all agree that work sucks sometimes and we all need a good rant now and then. Feel free to tell me what you guys think (or share your own bad internship experiences) because I’ve honestly been dying to talk to someone about all of it.