Often being an intern is more than a little bit lame.

Stuck on photocopying duty/coffee-making duty/researching-the-cost-of-white-goods-for-a-show-that-Channel-4-never-even-bothered-screening duty, the longing for something more interesting to do can become so overwhelming that one seriously considers such previously unpalatable career options as teaching IT to sixth formers, training as a probation officer or returning to the farm you grew up on to make organic goat’s cheese (a slightly less malodorous option than you might expect). 

But occasionally interning is amazing, and those days – even when they may not lead to paid work – do tend to make the other bits worth slogging through. Particularly when it allows an easily bored person to enact one of the biopics that’s long since run through their head. (Let’s not even bothering pretending it’s just me that does this. I know that at least some of you are out there hoping to turn your recession-era life experiences into the next great hipster/slacker/against all odds rom-com smash).

In New York, despite (or possibly because) I was living in a youth hostel full of crazy people while interning at a vaguely hip magazine, I constantly felt like I was in a film. And now here I am again, pretending to star in my very own European art-house feature about an aspirational young woman who’s been sent to central Europe for a week, to help to research a documentary about Poland that, if it goes ahead, will be screened around the time of this year’s Euro Championship. In reality it’s turning out to be more Tati than Kieslowski but you get the drift…

There is a good reason for my current living/paid unemployment conditions. Due to a family connection, the city of Warsaw and I have previous. A lot of really very meaningful adolescence experiences happened to me on its decidedly beautiful streets. Most significantly, when I was 14, it introduced me to high-heeled shoes, nightclubbing with older girls, the first CDs that really meant anything to me, and European cinema. I – like all the best underage lovers – gave it precisely nothing in return, opting instead to ignore it in favour of what I then saw as the west’s more glamorous pastures. Which is to say, as soon as I got back to school in the notably less gorgeous British Midlands, I bitched about the holiday incessantly.

Also, the documentary maker I intern with had to invite me because I’m pretty much the only person she knows with any grasp of the (admittedly quite difficult) Polish language, even if the bulk of my vocabulary did come from my grandparents, who I now realise may have been a little bit rough. One of my clues: when, aged 11, one is unsure of the contents of a dish on the menu of an upmarket restaurant, the correct question – however well-developed your accent – is not, “What the f**k is aspic?” even if that is what your Bubbe would have said.

This visit – for the sake of preserving my professional composure – I’m sticking to sight-seeing, politeness, and foodstuffs that I would know in any language.

Do widzenia.

X

More Intern X:

... on looking young

Off sick

Image: good secretary by anniebee on a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Sign up to IdeasTap for advice, funding, opportunities and our weekly newsletter – with all the latest arts jobs.