Dealing with Frustration
A quick disclaimer before I get into the recent events: the majority of the frustration I’ve experienced this past week come not from my internship, but the normal trials of working from home. Normally, I would think working from home is ideal and I genuinely think that after experiencing my internship remotely I would be totally open to working future jobs from home if given the opportunity. It’s incredibly convenient in a lot of ways. Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect system and, of course, it varies from household to household depending on internet speeds (and how many people are using the internet at once), whether the person working from home also has children to care for/teach, and just family drama in general (especially with quarantine causing tensions to be pretty high).
So yeah, I’m not about to get into all of the family drama at my house at the moment because that’s not what this blog is about, but I just want to make it clear from the start that the majority of my bad week stems from there, not from my internship. However, I do think it’s a valid portion to include in my blog in passing because that’s part of the remote internship experience — you have to take the good with the bad. And there is one bright side: I’m looking forward to going back to school more than ever.
The new challenge I faced during my internship this week was my supervisor’s request for me to find a consultant for his upcoming publication. I’ve mentioned this book in previous blogs, and after reaching out to several of my past middle school teachers to read and review it, the publisher has gotten a lot of feedback that this book would be a wonderful contribution to middle grade social studies learning, and possibly function as a bridge between social studies and English. The reason we need a consultant is my supervisor is looking for someone who could potentially talk to important people who could see about implementing the book in required middle grade social studies curriculum.
The first problem was that I had no idea where to start. I’d never done anything like this before, besides collecting a list of contact information from people with their work emails public, and I had no idea where to start looking.
The second issue: I’m not even sure this is a real job.
Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like a huge task that in itself could be an entire job description. Between the networking, the communication, the PR, the marketing, it sounds like it would be a whole lot to do. I don’t doubt that at all.
Where I’m getting tripped up is that I don’t think there’s an official title for this type of job (or if there is, I’m unaware of it).
I tried looking on LinkedIn to try to get an idea of what this job title would be, maybe some people who work this kind of job, anything, but I couldn’t. Nothing seemed to add up, especially nothing as specific as someone who works with books and K-12 schooling and social studies. I was genuinely at a loss and growing more frustrated by the minute. Combine this with my family drama and you get an intern who’s getting increasingly bitter and needs to go cool down and take a nap or something (you can do that when you work from home and make your own hours).
Okay, okay, don’t worry, the nap didn’t infringe on any of my actual work. Everything was still done on time. It’s called balance and self-care.
As of today, the whole consultant thing still isn’t 100% worked out, but progress has been made. I won’t get into all the gory details because they’re more boring than gory, but I did get into contact who put me in contact with someone else and then today I had a Zoom call. While this person couldn’t work as the consultant my supervisor had in mind (or even point us anywhere in the right direction — further supporting my hypothesis that this may not be a real job) she did show me a very promising advertisement opportunity in a publication that is sent to K-12 teachers and administration. I personally think this would be an incredible investment for my supervisor to take advantage of, but he may want to do some research and weigh his options before he commits. After all, of course they’re going to pitch it to sound great, it’s a potential for them to get paid. Not trying to be cynical, just trying not to be naive.
So while I had that information forwarded to my supervisor, I also found out that this whole consulting business sounds like something the publishing firm could take on by itself. Instead of hiring someone on commission to try to market the book, we could just find as much public contact information as we can and try to promote the best we can. In the meantime though, I’m sure the hunt will continue.
The lessons for this week seem to be 1) Working from home has its ups and downs and you have to learn to roll with it 2) Work in general has its ups and downs but you can’t let it get to you (although I’ve worked so many jobs before this and I’ve learned this lesson over and over and I still get worked up) and 3) Sometimes a nap is all you need to refresh and keep moving.
