Like the title says. I just finished a 15 week unpaid internship with a digital media company as a producer. I was familiar with the network which has millions of viewers and the show I worked on was very popular which got me excited at the start. I went in seeking journalism experience.
I took the internship (unpaid) during my final semester of my senior year of college, which now ends in one week. Entering the internship I thought it would be a cool experience to learn hands on but figured they wouldn’t ask too much of me considering it was unpaid. Turns out, they had me waking up at 7am and working till 4pm three days a week. Within one week they had me fully writing, producing, and editing my own stories which got turned to YouTube/FB etc. videos.
They began asking me to stay after and produce stories for the next show and to find and develop pitches for new stories in my off time. The show, while large only had a team of two producers and one host. Two producers fell out after a couple weeks (I even worked with them on my days off during spring break during this time) and our team ended up with one producer, me, and a new paid temp who knew as much as I did. It became all consuming but with all the work I was putting in for the show I thought I was earning….something.
As my time with them came to an end I realized how many coping mechanisms I’d developed to handle the workload, how I hadn’t been tending to my academic work as much as I should’ve, nor my mental and physical health. Upon the end of it, I reached out the the hiring director who I had developed a good relationship with to say thank you and inquire about positions, no reply. Another cc’d director i had never met sent a generic reply encouraging me to sign up for openings when I see them. Other than that I got a fairly nice but rather generic letter of rec from a producer which had.. not the best grammar and I had to photoshop it to say ‘he’ instead of ‘she.’ They also sent a, ‘keep in touch.’
I know to some extent it’s my fault, I signed up for it. I figured in media paid internships are near impossible to come by so I took the chance. I did learn a decent amount on producing digital news but I’m not sure it should’ve come at such a cost. By the end of month one I was no longer learning, just working as if I was a full on producer. Also sad to know my videos got millions of views but no credit to me for producing them. Is there any way this was positive and I’m looking at it wrong? I guess it was a large part of my life these months and now that it’s over I feel left with so little and a bit used.