My summer internship plans did not go well. I spent my Spring semester, as many Middlebury students do, hurriedly scribbling cover letters and attaching resumes to anyone willing to take on a lowly college student for little or no pay. The end result after email chains that lasted for months, interviews cancelled the day of and countless inquiries as to what my plans were, was silence. No replies. No condolence emails. Just dead silence as the academic year came to a close.
It is an odd feeling being ignored by positions that you are willing to work for at little to no pay. For the next month I convinced myself I was doing something productive with my time, that I was enjoying the break, that I needed some space. It was not until July, with my savings dwindling, that a swift kick in the ass from my father got me out of my self-pitying stupor. With all the dignity of a liberal arts student I wrote yet another email to the contractor who had recently renovated my parent’s home. The email went something like this.
“Dear Mr. ______, After a futile search for an internship this summer I have found myself looking for a job and was wondering if you would please hire me. Please, please give me a job, I need money so badly, please, please, I will work for little money. Please.”
Ahem. Okay, I exaggerate, but that was the general tone of the email. To my surprise, within the hour I had a response. “Hey Andrew, I really like a go getter. Let’s get you on a build site next week and see if we can work something out.”
It was my chance! The storm clouds had parted! Sure I didn’t know what I would be doing, but at least it was something. I would get to work outside, make a little money, maybe convince my father I was not a total lay about. What could go wrong?
In the next eight weeks I would be electrocuted, hit by a falling French door, breathe black mold, take a nail through the boot, get tendonitis in both hands, have a nail head rip a new scar in my arm and be smacked, whacked, cracked over the head and otherwise beaten up by one of the best jobs I have ever worked.
Construction work is hard, really hard. You wake up in the morning hurting in places you didn’t even know could hurt. Yes, the second row of knuckles on your right hand can be surprisingly painful. There was some pride in it though. A sense that you were earning your pay, that the numbers crawling upwards in my savings account were products of my literal sweat and blood. That alone was more than I could say for most of the internships I might have ended up at.
That was not to say it was always a great experience. Working in an attic on a 90-degree day pulling out insulation I could never spin as a good time. Not helping my case was the obvious observations that I was a college kid and I had no idea what I was doing on a job site. The first few weeks, more often than not, I was given a broom and told to sweep. Keep the job site clean. Sweep, sweep, sweep. I even got a lesson in how to sweep because apparently I was not much good at that.
In what I like to think of as parallel to the Karate Kid waxing cars for Mr. Miyagi, something started happening. My sweeping did not turn me into a master carpenter as perhaps waxing did for Daniel-san, but it did start to get me taken seriously. The college kid is pretty good at sweeping; maybe he can handle something else. Maybe he can cut two by fours. Okay he can do that; maybe he can rip out a bathroom. My sweeping was the avenue into jobs that actually contributed to the project, it was the way of proving I wasn’t just an uppity college kid afraid to get his hands dirty.
It is the rare experience that puts us completely out of our comfort zone. Even more so when all your training so far is completely useless to the job you have in front of you. My Political Science training did little to help me get a cast iron bathtub up a flight of stairs. Those experiences are often our most valuable. I find myself often deluded into a false sense of comfort here at Middlebury. That I can handle what comes my way based on the training I have received here. If you ever feel like you have everything figured out I would encourage you to pick up a broom and start sweeping.
Artwork by JENA RITCHEY
