An Abruptly-Ended Waiting Game

I'M VERY FAMILIAR with the admissions process. You send your favoured places piles of paper carrying your somehow-transcriped awesomeness. They review said piles of paper. You avoid looking at the phone/into the mailbox, bite your fingernails down to stubs, and then, roughly in proportion to how many piles of paper there are, how grumpy the admissions committee is, how the stars align, the degree of padding your resume boasts, and how much Murphy likes (or really doesn't like) you, the phone rings and/or the mailbox is filled.

What I didn't know is that some maverick activities and organizations refuse to conform to this universally accepted process. Yes, pursuits do exist whereby there are actually no freaking rules that govern the admissions process at all. Trying to get a summer internship in Washington, DC (which is the international capital of internships, leading to competition so intense that the city is also regarded, by a disgruntled minority, as the world capital of free, university-educated labour) falls into this category.

If you choose to do your internship through an organization like the Washington Center (http://www.twc.edu/), you don't just get an internship specifically tailored to your career goals. You also get to attend a bunch of private speaking engagements, and other activities, with TWC participants in your field. You get to take a related academic seminar taught by a naionally-recognized expert-often someone outside the academic community. And you make tons of amazing contacts.

But applying for an internship through an organization like TWC essentially means that there are TWO separate admissions processes that you, as an applicant, must contend with. I discovered that firsthand. Admission to TWC's International Affair's Program? Done a mere two weeks after I sent my application package to the University of Alberta's study abroad centre (I also got amazing financial assistance through scholarships this way, which is another reason why it gets my recommendation). I got an official acceptance letter, access to an online placement tracking system, the contact info of my advisor. Then, a whole lot of nothing.

What makes things so complicated is that TWC is standardized, while the internship placement process is not. At all. Period. Some internships start at the beginning of May, some at the beginning or even middle of June. Some of your most coveted institutions may only have internship programs for Masters or doctoral students, and you'll never even know this. As I discovered, some institutions contact you right away; others wait months. Some want an hour-long phone interview; others want a totally separate application package tailored to their needs; and still others (like my placement) just give your application and resume a close read, then call you up and offer you a job. It's a confusing process, to be sure. That means two things: that placing your affiliation in the hands of people who are paid to find you a job will give you peace of mind, and that it will likely make things a bit frusterating at the same time.

There are no regrets on this end, though. After a month of nail-biting, multiple interviews, cover letter rewrites, and more email correspondance than I'd care to admit, I'm on my way on Wednesay to an internship with International Action, an organization that's developing and implementing a chlorination system to provide clean drinking water in Haiti. I'll also be taking a course on civil and ethnic conflict while I'm in the capital, which is right up my alley, and definitely not offered at the U of A.

It's going to be a great summer. The hard part, though-getting my suitcase(s) packed in time to catch my 6am Wednesday flight-is yet to come.

;-)