T c D y n $ b 2 9 0 0 0 Interning in the Motor City with Michael, Jim, and Dwight Sophomore finds that her B-school skills aren't the ones she needs most By COURTNEY RATKOWIAK Daily StaffReporter I'm in the Ross School of Busi- ness. If there's one thing I've learned in my time here, it's that if you do it their way, you don't have to worry about "finding" a job. Starting the first week of your junior year, you get a "career tracker" poster, complete with four thumbtacks, to help you chart your internship-snagging progress on your bedroom wall. You go to cor- porate presentations, networking events and career development workshops. If you're a particularly effective networker, you end up on a company's "closed list," the VIP party invitation of the internship search world.If not, you go through an on-campus interview bidding process to secure your interviews. Companies come to the busi- ness school, you talk to them, they offer you an internship. You work there all summer, you do well and they offer you a full-time position after graduation - or, if the intern- ship wasn't for you, you repeat the internship search process with a full-time job in mind. Theonlythingisthatyou'realmost expected to already have internship experience before your junior year search. The business school won't help you out as a sophomore, so last February, I started looking. Unpaid internships were out. "Slave labor," my parents told me. "You're not working somewhere that doesn't value their employees enough to pay them." Working somewhere far from my hometown in Michigan was also out. I had learned enough in my accounting classes to know that paying rent and eating in New York while working a summer job would leave me with less money in my bank account than I started with. SoI applied for maybe 25 intern- ships online. I landed a few inter- views. But in the end, I got an internship in downtown Detroit because I'm my dad's daughter. The company was so large that I rarely saw my father and never worked with him. But it was a pleas- ant surprise when almost everyone pronounced my Polish last name correctly' and a little weird when I found out my boss once reported to my dad. I worked in a very traditional, corporate setting, but a lot of the time, it felt like I was stuck in an episode of The Office. My boss was nicknamed "Gator" (short for "del- egator") by the other people in the office because he would give.me all his work and then go to "meetings" for the rest of the day. While he was out, about half of the team would go downstairs to the massive cafeteria every morn- ing for hour-long workplace gossip sessions over omelets and coffee. On one particular day, it took the entire staff to figure out what should be done with a cockroach that had invaded the lobby. "Should we scald the bug with coffee? Should we put a recycle bin over it and just leave it there?" The debate went on' until a woman from another floor walked out and stepped on it. We didn't get any work done until after lunch that day. Like in the television show, some of the best times on the job happened outside the office. I had a front-row, paid-holiday spot on Woodward Avenue when the Detroit Red Wings brought home the Stanley Cup. I was also at the Red Wings rally at Hart Plaza for Kilpatrick's classy congratulatory comment of "the beer's on me," even though the boos were so loud that I didn't know what he said until I saw it on television. A few co-workers took me to see the casinos that were supposed to help Detroit's economy. They really were the only public places in the city that were bustling at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. We took long lunchtime walks along the riverfront, went to street festivals and watched the Martin Luther King High School band in its last performance before representing the city at the Beijing Olympics. I came into my internship think- ing there was little hope for the city of Detroit, that hosting the Super Bowl two years ago didn't solve anything and that former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick personified the city's mess. But by the end of the summer, I started to feel attached to a city that I had always ignored. While others spent their summer soaking up all the Barack Obama or John McCain news they could find, I became an expert on Kilpatrick. His crimes, jail time and court dates were hard to ignore when city taxes were coming out of my paycheck. I real- ized my business internship had somehow made me more interested in politics. Going into this year's on-campus recruiting season and surrounded by over-prepared, super-ambitious b-school students, I really am glad I already have an internship under my belt. My internship experience helped me learn that an office job doesn't have to be as dry as it often seems during corporate presen- tations. Sure, I used what I knew about Microsoft Excel and inter- preted a few financial statements. But I learned quickly that the skill the business school doesn't really teach well is the one that will help me the most coming into the junior year internship rat race - com- munication. Whether presenting a proposal at a meeting or watching another bug fall from the ceiling, I found you just have to start with a smile and a conversation. You won't find veggie burgers at this So if your career plans don't involve soy patties, Morningstar-except maybe in our caf6. We're find out how you can makea difference when we a leading independent investment research visit your campus. company based in Chicago's Loop with offices in 2008 Campus Visits more than 20 countries. We hire smart, driven Engineering Job Fair: September 23 individuals united by a common passion-helping Application deadline is October23 investors make informed decisions to reach their financial goals. 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