It was a cold Sunday night in Lauinger Library. As March turned to April, chatter around campus had shifted from complaining about midterms and reminiscing on spring break to what lay ahead: Fall 2025 course registration, sophomore year housing, and the dreaded summer internship. There is nothing inherently dreadful about an internship (beyond stuffy office wear in blazing heat and the violent loss of childhood summertime leisure). My sense of doom was instead derived from the all-too-familiar FOMO, or in Georgetown’s case, FOMNO — Fear Of Missing Networking Opportunities.
With each LinkedIn feed refresh and overheard conversation around the ICC, the word ‘internship’ (in a celebratory, not dejected tone, as had frequented my own summer application discourse) seemed inescapable. For the spring, I had applied to a singular internship and received a yes — a one-off success that had imbued me with a false sense of confidence about my prospects. After having applied to five summer internships, hearing back from one and seemingly being ghosted by the remainder, I was increasingly losing hope of having a LinkedIn-worthy summer work opportunity. So there in Lau 2, surrounded by overachievers and desperately procrastinating, I pulled out my phone and uploaded a TikTok poking fun at my own dim prospects.
The video posed the question “Do you have a summer internship?”, with my faux-dramatic response beneath it: “No. But I know love. I know kindness. I know how to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. I know the true meaning of a good time.” I slid my phone back into its face-down position and didn’t think much of it. But by morning, the video had 10,000 views. Throughout the day, its engagement kept doubling, where it sat two weeks later at 485,400 views with 94,800 likes, 244 comment,s and 3,173 saves.
I cannot attribute the video’s viral success to some expression of creativity — its text was co-opted from the poem “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake. Complaints have also grown to occupy their own genre of online content — my decision to take to the internet to whine about my lack of prospects was no more novel than it was productive. I think its appeal mainly lies in the fact that many students like myself feel disillusioned by the rhetoric of success infused in internship discourse; rejectees do not typically broadcast these responses, creating the illusion that being declined for a position is a singular and embarrassing experience.
My video gave doom-scrollers from every corner of the internet the opportunity to commiserate in our communal shortcomings. Many of my commenters expressed similar struggles: “Internship season is the bane of my existence [disdain]”; “Maybe the summer internship is the friends we made along the way”; “No co-ops, only peace and love this summer”; “Thank you for this. It’s rough out here.”
But it seemed that for every TikTok user who shared in my disillusionment, there was another leaving some variant of a hate comment. Their sentiments ranged from unnecessary commentary to flat-out cruelty: “Fortunately I can’t relate or repost”; “You’d be bummed to find out just how many people have both”; “Ha you’re cooked”; “Unemployed then”; “Hate to say it, but I definitely wouldn’t have been able to get a real job out of school without internship experience.” Thanks to the thick skin I grew from years of elementary school bullying, I know that haters are just a sign of my superstardom, and I didn’t take any of these comments too personally.
Another interesting genre of commentary that arose in my comment section was users disagreeing over premises only marginally related to the video. One comment, amassing over 1,100 likes, pessimistically wrote, “I feel so inferior to anyone who has an internship.” In response, a troll quipped back “you are”, prompting a commenting chain that ultimately devolved into childish insults and ‘your mom’ jokes. My interest in this particular exchange has nothing to do with the merit of the claim (a valid outlet of insecurity, but of course nonsensical), but rather the way people on the internet are empowered to bully each other relentlessly from behind the comfort of a screen.
Still, it’s not all bad. Despite the light-hearted intention of my video, I was flooded with words of encouragement from well-meaning users who sought to assure me that an internship was not the end-all, be-all of success. One comment, accruing over 600 likes, wrote, “Everything works out, I promise. I never had one and got a job post-grad. I was always so negative about myself, about not getting one. Just keep your head up and be positive. I promise good things will come.” Another commenter, addressing me as “Baby girl” (unrelatedly, how old do I look?), assured me that “Your pain is valid. What you’re feeling is valid.”
In further glimmers of hope, many returned to the video in the weeks after it was posted to update themselves and their fellow internship-hopefuls about their results: “Just got a summer internship, you guys.” “Finally got an internship offer today… was feeling hopeless before, so it’s not too late, gang.” This motif of ambition is what most stuck with me from my fifteen minutes of fame. Despite the external projection of constant success, especially at a school as pre-professionally oriented as Georgetown, rejection is a natural part of life and an inescapable part of any application process.
For those of us seeking to work in government, the hiring freeze has taken an especially treacherous toll on internship opportunities and flooded the application pool with overqualified candidates who can no longer work federally. But for now, all we can do is keep our heads up, keep applying, and remind ourselves not to get discouraged by a “no.” As cliché as it sounds, rejection really is redirection — I will be working at a local day camp this summer and making way more money than I would have in any corporate office job.
And in between applications, go like my TikTok. I want more clout.
