Is my boss right?

I'll add a couple of comments though they have been touched on by previous posters.

I worked in aerospace had frequently had interns to mentor. Basically, it was impossible to give them meaningful technical work. The interesting stuff would have too long a time scale, the urgent stuff would be too critical to trust to an intern and the low priority stuff would be soul crushing when the intern learned nobody was interested in their results. My solution was to treat it as an opportunity for the intern to learn how the corporate world functioned. You won't learn much engineering but you will learn about human dynamics.

I would take my guys to meetings and get them to comment on what they observed: Was the discussion based on logic or was it two alpha-males at battle? Was the meeting open or was the result predetermined and we were just their to give it an air of legitimacy? Did the meeting get out of control? What were the hidden agendas? How much compromise was there? What participants were weak? Strong? Total jerks? Who was the most effective person there, and why?

As you progress through your career the balance between technical work and managerial work will shift from the former to the latter. You could come up with a really good design for a new concept flap actuator but that is only 20% of the work. The other 80% is persuading senior management to free up the millions of dollars necessary to build and test the prototypes. If you learn how to do that you will have a successful career.

what should I do then wrote:

He was tasked to draw his own circuit boards, design a model which was then made into a prototype, and things of that nature (I don't know if he had the same supervisor as me).

Are you interested in doing that? Then go learn how to do it (lots of free circuit board design stuff online). If you have more of an interest in the mechanical side, get a student license of Solidworks (

) and learn it. I do product design for a living and design everything in Solidworks. Nearly every electrical engineering project eventually winds up in an enclosure of some sort. Find some circuit board your company has done and work on a cool enclosure for it. Maybe ask your boss if the company will pay for you to 3D print it, too. Maybe your company will find that they can use your mechanical engineering skills once you demonstrate them.

Or just keep whining about having nothing to do and how your friend gets to have all the fun.

A few things:

1) Is this your first internship? If so, at least you aren't working at starbucks or the student union. This will be a nice internship to put on your resume to start a professional looking one.

2) If it is your first well, everyone I have ever known does some photo copying. Hell I interned for a law office at 19 and did thousands of copies of legal briefs. It sucked but now I appreciate my job even more. It also is kinda a right of passage.

3) Are you getting paid? If you aren't getting paid then do whatever you want there but if they are paying you to make copies then do it so you can eat while in school. Again better than working at Starbucks.

4) Go to your boss and tell him you are interested in working on X whether it is practical and something you can complete or if it is theoretical and something you can write a literature review or disposition research paper on. THEN, NOW on your resume you write a bullet that says "Developed a research paper addressing new methodology to develop circuits that potentially improves XYZ....etc." If he says no, then persuade him by saying you are interested in it because it is something you have explored in your academic studies...

5) College internships are what they are. I had 3 at 4 months each. Jump around at least its something. Your treating this like its a full career at age 50 with a mortgage and kids to support. LOL. Also FFS go to grad school.

Update: It has been over 2 hours since my supervisor told me he would give me something to do. On top of this, he likes to take lunch early and when he leaves probably won't be back for at least another hour and a half.

This is my first internship and like you said, it is better than working at Starbucks. I am always super respectful because when I put this internship on my resume and my supervisor as a reference I want them to have nice things to say about me. I will definitely take do more on my own and take a look at the link at what Joe Jackson sent (network here blocks me from downloading anything). You are also right about getting multiple internships, I will try to improve as much as I can and do better at the next one. As for this one, I don't think I will be getting much more responsibility and my time might be better invested in myself getting familiar with public engineering information.

So here's the thing. As a City Planning major I found things I was interested in so the project obviously differ from you but....

Examples of conversation with boss: Don't have a demographic on elderly population in location to grocery stores? Maybe I'll use GIS to make a map.

Have floodplains in the jurisdiction but don't know where emergency shelter distance is in relation to those floodplains. Maybe I'll make a map.

Need a literature review on new urbanism. Sure thing. I took a class in it and can provide you guys a write up with recommendations to implement designs in your area. They might not even of wanted it but Id do it anyway.

Got a zoning amendment where you need to mail out letters to residents. Sure thing.Draft the letter and have boss sign it. Now if asked about public engagement on resume or interview I did it.

Have you ever considered looking at the population of minorities in relation to metro centers. I can examine that for you.

Have a Planning Commission meeting coming up? Need help drafting agenda? I'm on it.

I'm really interested in transportation planning. In my studies I've examined access to rail trails. I'd like to look at your area and see how rail trails could help the community.

These are all things that the jurisdiction probably wouldn't do or wouldn't get around to doing. Guess what I can use all of those bullets on my resume. I made it work. Start doing this.

A couple thoughts:

Your tone here doesn't come across as "super respectful". Your boss may be picking up on something that you don't realize you are doing. Pretending to respect someone you don't respect is harder than you may think.

Asking for something to do multiple times a day is too much.

Wow, that is really resourceful. I would like to take more initiative but I feel that I need more experience to take on more responsibility. I am definitely going to try going above and beyond on anything I am assigned, and then move forward from there. You provided some really great insight.

Paul2432 wrote:

A couple thoughts:

Your tone here doesn't come across as "super respectful". Your boss may be picking up on something that you don't realize you are doing. Pretending to respect someone you don't respect is harder than you may think.

Asking for something to do multiple times a day is too much.

The thing is, I do respect him. He is a reliable guy in the office with his coworkers, and I understand that he probably has more responsibilities and stresses than I can fathom, and I don't fault him for not giving me more to do. I don't mean to come off as whiny, all I am wondering at this point is that if I am not needed for anything important, it might be time for me to go. I am at a point in my life where I am 18 years old and have barely scratched the surface at what I am going to achieve in my life, and I might be better suited focusing on my development as an aspiring engineer rather than a menial scanner.

what should I do then wrote:

Wow, that is really resourceful. I would like to take more initiative but I feel that I need more experience to take on more responsibility. I am definitely going to try going above and beyond on anything I am assigned, and then move forward from there. You provided some really great insight.

There's two internship cultures. One where you are working for a big corporation that needs you to add lubrication to the gears via photo copies, and the other like a government agency that allows you to pursue your interests in the office environment.

The best internships allow you to work on a semester long project that will advance your academic career or allow you to choose your interests based upon what you have learned in school and apply them to solving a problem for the agency whether it be practical or theoretical. If you have nothing to populate a powerpoint presentation on and present it to either staff or professors, as little as it may be, when the internship has finished you have failed as an intern. That's your fault. It looks like you were just thrown into the job and the internship coordinator did not have something planned for you. This is his fault and he is a shitty coordinator. If I knew I had an intern I would scope out a project for him but I've also gotten really busy and did't have time between cycles.

It can be exhausting when you just worked with a former intern on an exciting project and then don't have time to creatively scope out another intern project for the new one (you) coming on that semester. I sometimes get burned out and need a professional rest for a month or so but I have an eager new intern grinning at me at 9am Monday morning. In this case, I'd usually email the department and ask if anyone can send me work ideas for the intern. In this case, I ask the interns what their academic pursuits are and tell them to spend some time reading over our documents and scoping their own semester long project that they went to do for school but helps me at work. You are not a secretary or stooge. Anyone treating an intern this way is evil. Send an email out to others in the office asking if they need any assistance on a project. Be bold! I did this once and got great projects as an intern. then went to my boss to make sure he was okay with it. Im telling you this might work. Only drawback is he might get mad but you are the happy eager intern taking initiative.

I would recommend you try to get a STEP or pathways clerkship with a federal agency. Those are the best internships.

Sometimes it is a no win. The boss doesn't have time to give you work or meaningful work. Or the boss won't make the time because he/she that any training is lost when you leave in a month or two. Besides asking the boss for work (but not so much as too be annoying) ask if you can offer to help others until the boss get back to you. Maybe don't ask to help others. Talk to others and see if they need help and then tell the boss you will be help a specific co-worker until the boss gives you another assignment.

Sorry bud but you effed up. Should be asking for work whenever you don’t have any left. They’re not your babysitters, do you expect people to come find you to ask for copies when they’re doing real work? Your boss shouldn’t have to take time out of his day to tell his intern what to do next, and next, and next...

Calling him a "fatass" and a "glutton" isn't showing respect. I get the "if he's not respecting me, why should I respect him" attitude, but this is way beyond respect. It's completely unprofessional. When I see a person ask for advice in a professional setting, and he or she does it in an unprofessional way it makes me wonder if the issue lies with the advice seeker.

I am not going to pretend like I am perfect, I am far from it. I am respectful towards him and I do genuinely respect his accomplishments, but he is morbidly obese. Just because I recognize the blatantly obvious fact that he is severely overweight does not make me respect him any less. Instead of trying to be politically correct all the time, sometimes we should take things for what they really are. In the moment I was upset and referred to him as a fatass anonymously on the internet. Did I say anything to his face? No. Do I agree with his eating choices? No, but it is none of my business. Do I respect him any less because of his weight? No. I did make a mistake the first time by doing my own work, but I handled the issue professionally by agreeing and not letting it happen again. Aside from that, in my head, I am free to think of him as a glutton. The idea that I have to filter my thoughts to be professional at all times is unrealistic. With all that said, I took the advice that everyone has been giving me and was able to receive another engineering-related assignment, so thank you everyone.

Instead of wasting your time by asking for busy work look for something you can learn independently. Learn a language, photoshop or anything that interests you.

This is a really good post, and accurately reflects the reality of internships at most companies. Unless you company is one of the very few with a truly well planned out and structured internship program, you are basically their to simply observe and absorb what you can about how the full-time job really works. Asking you boss for "assignments" is a surefire recipe to make yourself a burden rather than an asset. He's not a professor, and he's not going to have the time - or want to expend the energy - to lesson plan on your behalf and come up with homework for you.

You should be asking him if you can shadow him at meetings. Go to those meetings and take good notes. Once you've been to a couple and have some clue what is going on, then you can start trying to make useful suggestions or offers to take on some of his work. For example, if your boss agrees to send out meeting notes and next steps to the group at the end of a meeting, then after the meeting you should offer to type up your notes and ghost write that next steps email for him. If the outcome of a meeting is that your boss needs to schedule follow-up meetings with some people, then offer to reach out to those people and coordinate calendars. These is the kind of thing a supervisor appreciates from a new intern, and they are how you make yourself valuable and figure out for yourself how you plug into the organization.

Good luck