In Summer of 2020, I did my second engineering internship at a very well known defense company. I was grateful to be able to work considering many people I knew had their internships cancelled, but it was also a pretty chaotic time to have an internship (summer class, long commute, COVID-19, and the death of George Floyd). With all this going on, an internship just felt exhausting in so many ways. I had to be in the lab everyday by 6am while commuting from Silver Spring.
I tried to make the best of it but honestly, this internship was pretty miserable for me. I was working with mostly <conservative> white people and they didn’t give me enough work to do. My manager was friendly to me but she wasn’t really present much. I didn’t make a big deal of it since I had other people looking out for me there and I knew she was a brand new manager so I figured she just didn’t know what she was doing yet. I came to realize later though I was not being given the same grace by her.
During my first week I was so exhausted from waking up early and doing my summer class as well that I started to nod off a bit at work. It was hard to resist, given the fact I had no work assignments and couldn’t have my phone in the lab. I was given a warning by a coworker/work friend that I should be very careful about falling asleep because there are some miserable coworkers there who would snitch for sure. After talking it out with her, I pretty quickly decided that the best thing I could do was drop the class because I couldn’t manage doing both without looking bad at work and being exhausted.
Of course, given the context of that summer there were a lot of race related conversations at work. I had one coworker proudly say that he doesn’t acknowledge race and more nonsense like:
There’s only one race— the human race!
Annoying coworker
Yuck, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough! I made the best that I could out of it and eventually my last day did come and I was so glad. I was enjoying my last lunch with my few work friends who even brought a pie and a goodbye gift for me. Everything was going so great and then I got an email notification… from my manager. She was out of office for the day but she finally, on my last day, sent in my final performance evaluation. She never had anything negative to say to me in person but all of a sudden I was a terrible employee who slept at work and didn’t do anything. Of course my good day was ruined then and I started to cry. I was so frustrated, why did she wait to say anything? Nothing she wrote was accurate but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was devastated thinking I ruined my chance at a future job offer. A lot of people could vouch for the fact that I was a good intern, but it didn’t matter because my manager (who never spent any time with me) was the only one whose opinion held any weight.
I was reprimanded for being human by being tired at work. I didn’t even fall asleep… I just nodded off. My manager took that and ran with it and added more lies about me in the evaluation for whatever reason, things that didn’t even make sense (like how can I be late for a meeting that never happened?!)
When talking to some of my school friends about the incident I later ended up finding my manager’s Twitter account and found out she was a huge Tr*mp supporter. I saw some pretty disturbing posts that she liked, including a meme like this:
Bottom: Photo of looting at Target after George Floyd’s death with caption “This is a crime”
Seeing this picture was enraging for me. After seeing this post, I can’t help but think that my race was involved with how I was perceived by my manager. I mean come on, I hardly even interacted with her enough for her to have had so many negative things to say about me. She never even mentioned her frustrations at any point, including our midpoint review. She also smiled in my face whenever she did see me and pretended everything was fine, only to wait for my last day to let me down (while not even in the office.. coward!) I think back on that one coworker saying there’s “only one race” and how race isn’t important and I get pretty irritated. It clearly meant everything that summer.
Unruly Bodies 
Wow, I am so sorry to hear this horrible encounter happen. This article definitely made me think of capitalism and race in America. On one hand, American culture is to work util extinction. Our nation was built off people who were sent here to work (seek new land and cultivate it.) This progressed to the puritan idea of doing good deeds and contributing to society and so on. I can literally go on for days with how American culture is “to be financially successful.” This has a lot to do with our experience in my opinion. You had to push yourself to excel and you did a GREAT job pushing yourself to your limit while making friends and being self aware. The labor force is hard to battle and you did good. Also, race had a part to play. Based off of the article, the race relations in this country at the time definitely fueled America and created spaces in which people felt comfortable to judge one another easily. I would not know if she had racial intentions, but the space at the time, in my opinion, definetely fueled the situation to some degree. Nice read!
Geez, I’m so sorry you had to deal with that! It’s completely baffling how ignorant people sound when saying things like to the affect of “I don’t see color”! You may not see color, but everyone else sure does. It can be honestly disturbing seeing how a pretty okay coworker of sorts can turn into a completely different person when you find out they’re a bigot… People show their true color, eventually it seems. I think that you definitely did amazing keeping your cool, even if it was hurtful for your manager to have given you such a made up evaluation. Congrats on being able to exit with your head held high, hopefully you’ll be able to find a job that doesn’t have such disrespectful managers. Thank you for sharing you experience.
Im sorry that this happened to you! I think it is really shameful that in order to get into many industries, you have to start at a low level position where you get treated like this. As you said, we all need rest and as an intern, they should presume you are balancing school as well as work. Any job should be understanding about bodily needs, but when someone has the status like an intern, that awareness is sadly limited.