Internship Supervision
I am honored to be asked to help supervise internships. There are many reasons to do internships, and I believe internships should be opportunities to gain work experience with groups that benefit from your labor, but don't make a profit on your labor. For this reason, I'm happy to supervise internships for non-profit groups, such as museums, libraries, non-governmental agencies, or faith-based charities. There are lots of non-governmental agencies to choose from, many of which are eager for your expertise. Generally, I do not supervise internships with private firms like real estate agencies, human resources managers, or media conglomerates.
At the end of the quarter I'll ask for a paper on your experiences. It shouldn't be the generic "things I learned" paper. Instead I would like to know three organizational secrets. In Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he argued that there are five types of secrets:
- Dark secrets – concealed facts incompatible with self image
- Strategic secrets – concealed intentions that might influence other person’s action
- Inside secrets – concealed facts that are a source of identity
- Entrusted secrets – facts you are obliged to conceal as condition of group membership
- Free secrets – disclosable facts that do not threaten own identity
Even though he was writing about people, organizations have secrets like this too, things that you only learn about only by observing the organization from the inside. I would like you to write thoughtfully about three secrets you learned by engaging with an organization as an intern. You might not want to report on dark or entrusted secrets, but it might be interesting to write about strategic, inside and free secrets. No need to reveal names or expose criminal activity. For example, in one of the best papers I received last year, a student wrote about her experience working at a public gym. She discovered that the security cameras in the lobby were not trained on the doors to observe the public, but trained on the area behind the counter to observe the staff. She wrote a great organizational story about how this had come about, and how she and her colleagues felt about surveillance by her employer. If you want to develop some new ideas about organizational secrets, that would be welcome too.