Do you have what it takes to be the next ‘intern’?

If there is one thing that Robert De Niro has taught us in the recent past, it is that internships are not just about gaining experience or being able to add items to your resume. Sometimes internships are about relationships.

In last year’s movie “The Intern”, Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro’s character) didn’t start off looking to build relationships, he was just bored being a retiree and was looking for something to do with his time, but that is what happened.

Now most of us do not take internships because we are bored, but to gain skills and experiences that neither life or school has given us. (And yes, it does spruce up a resume.) Though if we simply hoped to gain skills and/or work experience during our internship we would be losing out.

When I was in college, my classes were just a fraction of my college experience. Without Cafe Wha? (look it up), newspaper, museums, drama, shopping, and Aces and Eights, I don’t know if I would have been the well rounded person I am today. At the same time without Steve, Rocky, Barbara, Adam, Gabriella, and Lisa, I wouldn’t have made it out alive.

And when I took on internships, I remember what it was like spending time (“working”) with Steve (yup, same one), Lisa (not the same one), Michelle, and Joan more than I remember what actual work we did. I remember when Steve and I stole one of our boss’s headshots (that she had been sending out when she was voted president of AJPRS) and affixed it to a dart board to give to her assistant, as a birthday gift.

I remember when Lisa, Michelle, Joan, and I went to see U2 at Yankee Stadium, and Joan and Lisa snuck backstage.

I remember sharing 6 orders of cheese fries with Ben, Becky, and Jessica at 3 in the morning after finishing compiling some sort of data that our boss needed for some important meeting the next day (a meeting which, only after the internship was over, did we find out had been cancelled).

Do I remember the work I did for the Weizmann Institute of Science, or what I did for Bender, Goldman & Helper (other than being able to borrow a lot of videos)?

After so many years in the workforce there is not  single thing I can remember having worked on throughout my internships, but the relationships that I had last through to today (though some only as fond memories).

So yes the senior citizen intern Ben (from the movie, in case your short term memory is shorter than it should be) could have kept busy being an intern and doing any tasks that were sent his way, and gotten what many of us get out of our internships. And yes Jules (Anne Hathaway’s character) could have gone on being a successful owner (if not continuing to be CEO) of a successful fashion internet startup, but who would their characters both be as people (when the curtain went down) if they had not experienced this chance relationship?