I’m Special by Ryan O’Connell Page A

Emotions” Port. Occasionally Lisa Love would make her do something pressing like fly to New York to drop off a dress, but other than that, the whole thing looked like a fake snoozefest. By the end of the series, Lauren had moved on to selling her own cocktail dresses and developing a fashion line for Kohl’s while still pretending to live the life of a struggling intern on TV. It was so rude! You can’t expect viewers to believe your job is fetching coffee when you’re selling a $300 dress called the Audrina.
    Even though Lauren Conrad’s experience was inauthentic, I was hooked on the idea of interning myself. In the late 2000s, interning had morphed into its own strangely elitist culture, thanks to movies like The Devil Wears Prada , which glamorized working for a sadist on a nonexistent salary. College students everywhere were eager to be abused by some bossy bitch in Isabel Marant because it made us feel accomplished and deluded us into thinking that after putting up with someone’s bullshit for an entire summer, we would be guaranteed a job.
    This turned out to be laughably untrue. Despite the occasional exception, internships are primarily used by employers to get free labor—especially by the cash-strapped industries I was interested in working in, like publishing. If you do decide to intern (and let’s be honest: there isn’t much of a choice), you must go into it with no expectations. Just try to get as much experience as you can, make a connection with one of your employers so you can use them as a future reference, and get the fuck out. You are there simply to give your résumé some padding and hope/pray that another company with a bigger budget will be impressed enough to give you an entry-level position.
    The summer after my accident, I got my first internship with a website called Popsense , which was a tiny pop culture blog run by two twenty-year-old juniors at NYU. I was older than my bosses—a reality that isn’t that uncommon in blogging jobs—but I didn’t care. I was so desperate to beef up my anorexic résumé I would’ve picked up dog shit for Suri Cruise. Eugene Lang placed such an importance on internships that I feared I was already falling behind in the rat race. I felt so unaccomplished next to sophomores who would casually rattle off all their internships in class. “Yeah, so I first started interning at sixteen for Harper’s and then I landed at McSweeney’s and now I’m at Vogue . So I’m, like, on a really good track right now.” What the hell? When I was a freshman in college, I was watching Six Feet Under in my dorm room with the covers over my head and pretending I had a coke problem. Once, at a party in Los Angeles, I met an intern who was only fourteen years old. I wanted to say to her, “Honey, just go home, pick your zits in the mirror, and call some boys on the telephone. You don’t need to do this yet.”
    But maybe she actually did! The recession hit when I was a junior, and we all scrambled to get any job experience we could before graduating. Since most of my classmates were wealthy to begin with, they could afford to work for no pay for six months. Internships were designed for people like them. They come with an entry fee that rewards the rich and penalizes those who don’t have the luxury to work twenty-five hours a week for free while going to school full-time. To work for no money, you must have money to begin with.
    Which brings me to my scarlet letter: m for malpractice! When I was born a gimp instead of an able-bodied princess, my parents sued my delivery doctor and won me a settlement of money I would receive when I was eighteen. Without this little nest egg, I could have never afforded to live in a city like New York or even intern. Are you kidding? People whose parents file for bankruptcy don’t get to intern. That lawsuit was a damn miracle, and I had to take