How Do You Deal With Competitive Interns?

After what seemed like years of anticipation, I'm finally back at Teen Mag! It seems like since the moment my plane landed last week, I've been buying clothes, stocking up on Moleskines, and flipping through my notes on HTML from last summer so that I could jump right into my work at Teen Mag. And it was so worth it!

I knew I was so excited to head back, but I didn't realize that my editors were excited to have me back as well! I was so happy that they each hugged me and asked me how my time abroad had been. It was so sweet! I was especially flattered that one of my editors called me her "star writer" and told me she couldn't wait to have my writing all over TeenMag.com. Seriously, I thought I might die of happiness.

Meeting this year's crop of interns, however, was not half as fun as reuniting with my editors. I had great expectations for them: Teen Mag is known for building intern classes that become really close, and my intern class from last summer still Facebook chats, tweets, and follows each other's blogs. (One of my fellow interns from last summer came to get lunch with me after she finished up an interview!) This summer, things don't look as peachy.

Would You Speak Up If An Intern Wasn't Doing Her Job?

Hey Edsters,

I’m just about halfway into my internship, and things are going well. I’ve learned a lot so far, and I really feel like I’ve become a part of the office dynamic. In the past few weeks, though, I’ve come to a bit of a dilemma. What would you do if you knew one of the other interns wasn’t doing her job right?

There’s a group of us interns with rotating schedules, meaning that we don’t necessarily work with the same people every day. I work three days in a row, so I can usually start and finish the same projects over the course of the week. Other interns, however, may work every other day, so sometimes we go into each other’s e-mails to finish up whatever they had been working on the day before. This may seem weird, but we all have the same password, and it feels normal to read other people’s e-mails now.

One day last week, though, I went into another intern’s e-mail to check if she had gotten fact-checking responses from a publicist. She had gotten answers, so I printed out the e-mail and started inputting changes into the article. I soon realized, though, that she had worded the questions in the exact same wording as was in the actual story—something that our editor definitely told us not to do on our very first day of work.

How Do You Deal With Competitive Interns?

Hey Edsters! 

Things are still going well at the Lifestyle Mag. I have a much better idea of what to do so I can stay busy, and with a couple of long-term projects passed to me by editors, I've been staying busy. 

Here at Lifestyle Mag, there are 4 summer interns, and there is one in particular that I work closely with on a daily basis. For the sake of this blog, we'll call the other intern Annie. So far I've really loved working with Annie. She's really cool, hard working, and has great goals for her future career in magazines. However, Annie and I have been getting closer lately and for the first time this week she referred to me as the dreaded "C" word I've been trying so desperately to avoid.

Annie called me her competition.

Intern Invasion: Sizing Up the Competition

In the beginning, I prided myself on being the first intern this summer at the magazine, especially since my supervisor mentioned they hadn’t had any interns in quite a while. Although not all the staffers knew my name, they identified my status based on the location of my desk, in the isolated middle section of the office.  Over the past couple of weeks, they’ve solely relied on me to complete their research or transcribing tasks.  My supervisor has even recognized my willingness to go the extra mile, whether it means working through my lunch break or staying well past the time I’m supposed to leave.

Just when I’ve started to feel more comfortable in my role at the magazine, I realized I wasn’t the only new kid on the block.  Evidence in the form of new post-it notes tacked to my bulletin board and past issues strewn on my desk was proof that other interns have arrived on the scene.  It was inevitable that others would have to pick up the slack on the days when I wasn’t scheduled to be in the office, but I could rationalize that it was OK since I didn’t interact with them.  Out of sight, out of mind…right?

Boy was I wrong.