First of all, sorry for my broken English, it’s not my native language. It's going to be quite long so there is a TL;DR at the end.
To give you a little background about myself, I am a last year engineering student at one of the French “Ivy League”. For my last year, I chose the “apprenticeship” program: basically, I’m working part-time as part of my degree. I interviewed with a lot of companies and NGOs, and eventually got several offers. In particular, two of them stand out. Even though they were quite different (a big company, on one hand, and an NGO on the other hand), they had a major common point: sustainable development, at least that is what I thought. My heart told me to choose the NGO, while my brain and family told me to choose the company. I eventually chose the company and started working there in early September. Turns out I’m feeling completely miserable right now.
I would like to have your advice and opinion about my current situation.
Company’s missions and tasks: The position got falsely advertised as the perfect job for someone who cares about the environment and wants to propose innovative ideas, and that’s what got me interested in the job in the first place. But honestly, the job is anything but “innovative” and nobody cares about the environment. I would even say it’s quite the contrary: some colleagues are borderline climate skeptics. What’s funny is that I told them during the interview process that it was very important to me and probably the main motivation behind my application. What’s more, the tasks are not interesting at all. I am spending all my time finetuning excel sheets or doing minor improvements. Sure, I did a little bit of that during my previous internships (which I loved btw), but it was not the “end goal” of my job, just a tool to be used for other activities. I don't feel like I am learning anything, but just doing some work at a low cost for the company. It should be a two-way relationship, and for now, it’s definitely one-sided. I honestly feel like a secretary (not belittling the people doing that job, just saying it's not the position I applied for): my typical day consists of transferring outlook account creation requests to the IT department, saving and sorting documents in the appropriate folders. On paper, I’m supposed to be an “international project engineer”. I think we can all agree that it’s not really related to engineering and I’m starting to get bitter, I don’t see the added value for me or society in general.
Uninvolved manager: he was appointed as my “professional mentor”, and is legally accountable for supervising and tutoring me, but he doesn’t do the job at all. I never get any feedback on my work; he doesn’t have time to dedicate to me (we probably had like one or two hours of face-to-face conversation in three months) and he makes sure to tell me every time he’s too busy to see me. To some extent, I do understand him because he really seems to be busy, but this is quite frustrating. Sure, I can always try to have a conversation with him but honestly, it does not make me want to try. I had one of the best managers ever at one of my previous internships so I may have set my expectations too high, yet
Toxic atmosphere: The whole team seems to be dying inside, nobody talks to each other except during lunchtime and it's always work-related. People don’t even say hi to each other (which seems to me like the bare minimum of politeness to me). There is a constant feeling of uneasiness. Of all the 3 persons I met during the recruitment process in June/July, 2 have already left the company, one of them being the only person that showed a tiny bit of consideration to me and tried to tutor me. I mean, I’m not really fond of constant team-building, but gosh it’s totally absent there. There’s no team at all, just people sitting next to each other in an open space. The other trainee in the department (way older than me, currently changing careers) seems to have a similar experience as well. I’m an introvert myself so it’s sometimes difficult for me to socialize, but still, I do appreciate a little bit of team-building and my previous experiences came off well despite my shyness. My manager often goes on business trips, and I can’t express how much I feel relieved when he’s not around. All interviews were done remotely since I was doing an internship abroad, which is a shame because I would definitely have noticed something was off.
And then there are all the subtle things that may not appear as serious issues when considered one by one, but become disturbing when added up:
· When I received the contract, I found out that the pay was lower than what they initially offered me during the recruitment process. I asked them if it was a mistake and they replied that it was there was no mistake (even though I’m pretty sure it’s not the case, I take many notes during interviews, and it was not what I wrote). Btw they sent the contract to my school but never sent it to me directly and replied really late when I needed it asap to rent an apartment.
· I was not invited to the onboarding event for trainees like me and only found out about it a month later.
· My predecessor completely changed careers after her contract ended.
· My manager is passive-aggressive with other employees, badmouthing them on many occasions. For instance, he seems to have a grudge against the secretary of the department, who is probably the kindest person I’ve met so far in the company, and has a workload of three people since they laid off the other secretaries. Another example is when we held an online meeting, and he asked me to send everyone the list of absentees in red even though I told him that a lot of them were on vacation that day.
· The atmosphere doesn’t seem that tense in the other teams. I interacted with some people from the other departments, and they all seem much happier. Maybe the grass is greener, but my interactions with them were all positive.
· I tested positive for Covid yesterday and today I was not feeling well at all (I’m barely able to stand and I’m bedridden for now). He called me this afternoon and I thought it was to check up on me. Turns out it was just to ask me if I sent an email for a completely non-urgent task. Gosh, at least pretend you care a little bit.
· First interviewer initially sent me an invitation for a totally different job.
· Second interview (now my boss) showed up very late to the interview. I can’t remember the exact delay, but he was so late that I thought he forgot about the interview and started writing an email to HR to ask if there was an issue when he finally logged in. He also replied to one of my emails on Sunday at 10 pm.
· Third interviewer barely answered when I asked her what she liked about the job. She left in early October.
· Inappropriate questions and comments regarding my ethnicity. I can’t really say if it’s tactlessness or something more serious, but this has already happened quite a few times. Hearing things like 'you speak French well” when I was born and raised in France my entire life is really inconsiderate.
· There is an infamous project in the department that is known for making every project manager that worked on quit in the following months. Well, it got transferred to a new project manager, and turns out I have to support her on the project as well. People were joking about that when the previous project manager (3rd interviewer) left.
· This is not related to the job directly, but I should point out that my parents face extreme financial issues. My entire salary goes to essential needs (food, rent, commute) and I don't save a single dime. Thus, I don’t have any money left to pay for hobbies outside work to compensate for the boredom. To make it worse, the pay is just a little bit above what the NGO offered me, so it’s definitely not worth it.
At first, I told myself that there were only a few months to go, but honestly, this is soul-crushing and very depressing. I don’t think that it will teach me anything useful, so career-wise it’s useless too. Furthermore, I feel incredibly guilty since my gut feeling told me to choose the NGO and I completely ignored it. In a way, this experience did teach me to listen to my intuition, but I understood that in just a few weeks and now I have to endure the job for 9 months. Problem is that it's part of my curriculum: I don’t have my degree yet and so can’t start applying to other jobs. Every day I’m just daydreaming about September 2023, hoping that I will make better choices. I’m spending nearly half of my days taking a look at more interesting job offers to get some ideas for when the time comes, but it’s escapism.
I wish I could easily bring up these issues to my manager, but my description probably convinced you that he’s not the kind of person you want to interact with. Besides, I can’t find any redeeming qualities, so it would be really awkward.
Do you have any ideas of things I could do to improve the situation?
TL;DR: missions and values totally different from what they sold me, uninvolved manager, toxic atmosphere, numerous questionable practices, but I can't quit. Any ideas?