9 Things Every Media Intern Knows To Be True

1. You have a minimum of 10 tabs open at once.

Perhaps you’re revamping the blog for that chic wine magazine that opened earlier this year. Or maybe you’re live-tweeting a soccer match. But surprise, surprise, friends. In your 21 years of existing you’ve stuck to that one brand of wine simply because the bottle was cute and it was under $10. Did you play soccer in high school? Only if kickball in 4th period PE counts. Jokes on you if you thought you got away without having to do at least some kind of research with your “modern-day media degree.” You’ll become a wine and soccer connoisseur before you know it. Because your deadline is right now.

2. Free time is spent experiencing extreme blogger-envy towards those who seem to have their shit together. 

Between your internship, your classes, your barely-there social life, you have little time to make sure your personal website, photographs, travel fantasies become a reality cleverly and in uniform. Therefore, whenever you find yourself with an extra 20 minutes to spare, you do what everyone else your age is doing. You surf the web. But not just any web. You search the blogosphere: a magical land where people just like you travel the world, people-watch, try every outfit they own, and record it all on the way… for a living. Their website is seamless, their posts are daily, and their comment sections are bountiful. These people are perfect. You love them. You hate them. But they will eternally be subject to your worship.

3. After spending hours working social media for a company, the last thing you want to do is log onto your own social media channels. 

If you have to type in “twitter.com” one more time into Google Chrome, you’ll roll yourself onto a busy street and await your fate. Some people anxiously anticipate the moment when they walk into their home and throw off their pants. You, on the other hand, wait for the time you can close all of those tabs and say goodnight to your significant other… your laptop. Finishing your work is like going incognito. Like putting on your Nicole Richie shades and falling off the radar. You long for the days you can vacation on a secluded island with zero wi-fi. You may even contemplate deleting your own Twitter or Facebook profile. Toddlers just have it so easy.

4. But you do it anyway because that’s your portfolio, babe. 

Deleting your own social media channels? That’s cute. You quickly remind yourself that your blog and your online persona are what got you your job in the first place. So not only do you post regularly. You post even more. You publish what you’ve been doing at work on your own accounts. You share your company’s events and articles and photographs. You find yourself online even more than you need to be. Some people call it obsessing. We call it self-promotion. And we do it shamelessly.

5. Coffee, coffee, coffee.

The barista probably knows you by name. Guess who drinks Starbucks? Anna Wintour. Guess who’s very name is a coffee brand? Oprah Winfrey. Jackie Chan called coffee “a language within itself.” These people aren’t just famous, they have a following. They have a story to tell and fans to please. So you worship them. You follow their every move and so naturally, you take up coffee drinking. You may start ordering a triple skim wet cappuccino à la Nicole Kidman because in the beginning, you really don’t know any better. But then you start to develop your own taste. Slowly but surely your barista begins to recognize you. He’s just so nice. He even offers you free Wi-Fi. Now you can spend the whole day at the café and show the whole online community how coffee is the nectar of the gods as you tag your low-fi filtered photo of your cup of joe with #internlife.

6. You know the eternal struggle of keeping your personal and professional social media accounts separate. 

You’ve been hearing “nothing online is really private” since you can remember. Therefore, you refrain from cursing or posting those “Thirsty Thursday” photos on your blog. But sometimes, the world needs to know how much you admire Beyonce’s latest quote on how the thigh gap is overrated. Or how annoyed you are that every table at your now favorite coffee shop is full. But your boss doesn’t need to know this. So you make two profiles. Voilà. However, you can’t help but think about how much funnier you are in personal accounts or how you have way more followers on your professional account and you lay awake at night wondering how combining to two would make you the social media goddess you know you can be.

7. The ability to work remotely is both a blessing and a curse. 

Remember that college friend who encouraged you to choose the online class so you could take notes in your pajamas? Remember how many times you actually logged on or attended that class once you did? Yeah, me neither.  At the beginning of your internship, you may that having two out of five days to work from home translates to you lounging somewhere fabulous with a cosmo in hand, a sun hat the size of the moon, and your computer sitting casually within arms reach. This vision is a fantasy, kids, and is actually the farthest thing from reality when catch yourself rolling out of bed to update your company’s website with last night’s make up still on and half your notes sprawled on what used to look like your dresser. It gets even worse when you’re drafting from your phone with spotty wi-fi as your boss moves the deadline up for your blog post to two hours from now. You know that opening sequence featuring baby Simba in The Lion King. That’s what you and your phone look like.

8. Screw coffee. Wine, wine, wine. 

Coffee is mere child’s-play after months of online community building and hashtag trend-surfing. Now it’s time for the big leagues. You start getting invited to company happy hours. This is as exciting as it is terrifying because now you actually begin to deal with people. No more username to hide behind. You wonder how many fabulous people you start to mingle with actually know your online persona and then you begin to freak out because you realize you may not be as fabulous or as charming as you let on to be online. But guess what? We’re all in the same boat. Why do you think media specialists even host happy hours and not say, picnics, in the first place? Two words, mama: liquid courage.

9. You are forever grateful because you have successfully put that communications major everyone said you could do nothing with to work.

This is the part where you get to boast. Behind the late night tweets, endless blog rewrites, constant networking via email with people you have yet to meet in person, you realize that you are living the dream. You have managed to turn your childhood passion, storytelling, into more than just a hobby. You get to play show-and-tell as an adult to wider audiences. You get to write a diary that is published so others’ can learn from your experiences and hopefully, find a little inspiration themselves. You’re as much a team as you are the star of your own online world, and you know that with the right management, with the right opportunities, you’ll never stop adoring what you do.