The Academic Success Center
and the Major Exploration Fair

If you are new to UNLV, welcome. You are now Read more

Is that your final answer?

Answering your interview questions tactfully can be difficult – let our panel of recruitment experts be your life line Read more

Extreme makeover: résumé edition

Experience, professionalism and style – If you’ve got it, flaunt it Read more

Fall marketplace:
careers in the crunch

Strong showing at career fair points to employers’ willingness to hire promising, educated people, despite economy Read more

Networking beats not working

Winning in a tough job market requires building realtionships. Read more

Job search 2.0: Creative thinking gets the job

Winning over employers is about learning to market yourself in unique ways Read more

Student interns take risks, play hardball

He sat at the round table alone, empty seats staring at him in the back room as if to mock his every clench of the stapler. The time slowed, the lights were lonely and the summer air felt cold. What else was there to do than, well, sleep?

Joshua Anderson, whose name has been changed to protect his job, is a typical student, with typical classes and a typical dream. He wants to be an accountant and he’s figured out that he must start at the bottom before he can move up.

“I’m an intern at an accounting firm,” Anderson said as he folded his arms. “I do the grunt work. I do what I’m supposed to, but sometimes they make me feel so low that I wonder if I’m really in college.”

Anderson has been an intern for the past two years and confessed that he has been known to stir the pot once in a while. From sleeping on the job to sabotaging another intern’s work, he said he has to do what he can to get ahead.

“I remember one day when I was stapling pages together in a back office,” Anderson recalled. “I was all alone, finished the daunting task in a half hour and I was tired — so I slept.”

He added that if employers are going to give interns mindless work, they have to expect the boredom to exhaust them. Anderson wasn’t caught sleeping. He said his employers believed that his stapling skills were lacking and it took him a while to complete the task.

Junior Melani Reyes interns at a Las Vegas architecture firm. After being low on the totem pole since her freshman year, Reyes said she has also slept on the job.

“When I first started, the work was extremely easy,” she said. “I would proof some things and then I was tired. They didn’t push me to try new things at the beginning.”
Reyes recalled one day when her to-do list ran dry and her bosses left for the day.

Instead of finding something else to work on, she crawled under her desk by the window and slept a little too long.

“I woke up and everyone [had] left the building,” she said. “I slept past closing time — how embarrassing. But I was young and didn’t really know the dynamics of interning. I didn’t understand that I was supposed to ask for more work when I was finished.”

Unlike Reyes, Anderson knew early on that his internships would be integral in getting him future jobs. For that reason, he felt the tension between himself and the other interns constantly.

“I knew it was on, the moment my competition walked in the door,” he said. “I knew that I had to step up my game, but I remember one guy who was stiff competition.”

Anderson said that one day his bosses asked him and the other intern to do the same project separately as a test of strengths and weaknesses. An hour before deadline, Anderson’s competition went to the restroom, so Anderson went to his computer.

“I pulled up his spreadsheet and pressed delete,” he said. “Was it wrong? Of course it was. In the end, though, I’m still employed with [the firm] and he isn’t.”

Law student Robert Beckler worked at a law firm during his undergraduate studies and said, although there shouldn’t have been competition, another student worker tried to sabotage him.

He he was asked to deliver important papers during a big case, but when he arrived at the destination hefound he had the wrong papers.

“It was a terrible feeling to know that I put the correct papers in my bag, but they were changed,” Beckler said. “Luckily, I took care of the situation and in the end got the last laugh. I got her fired.”

Reyes didn’t experience any sabotage, but she said she did things that she regrets.
“One day I had to work at a conference and pass out pamphlets,” she explained. “It was an hour in, my feet hurt, I was bored and I had tons of pamphlets left.”

Instead of passing out the remaining pamphlets, Reyes said she threw them in a back kitchen trashcan and proceed to tell her boss her task was complete. Although she knew it was wrong, she felt justified because the newest intern had a more in-depth task.

“I was furious that they allowed the new intern to mingle with the executives and gave me such a mindless task,” she said.

In the tough world of internships, these stories are far from unusual. Many interns seem to agree: sometimes you have to cheat to beat.

Students continue job search despite difficult trying times

As summer vacation officially came to an end Wednesday morning Read more