Internship Abroad Quotes

She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn't socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger [...] their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I'd forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; they freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless. For all I had in common with any of them, I might as well have tried to go down and hang out with the eight year olds at PS 41.

Above all, they feel a growing sense of precariousness for their children, as it is clear that even with the best qualifications, foreign language skills and experience abroad, they will often have to face the treadmill of internships or temporary work, and frequently have to prove themselves before obtaining employment on regular terms.

An eighteen-year-old must be able to find his way around a campus, the town in which her summer internship is located, or the city where he is working or studying abroad. The crutch: We drive or accompany our children everywhere, even when a bus, their bicycle, or their own feet could get them there; thus, kids don’t know the route for getting from here to there, how to cope with transportation options and snafus, when and how to fill the car with gas, or how to make and execute transportation plans.

Today it has become enormously expensive for families to pay for tutors and extra prep classes for important academic subjects, not to mention extensive lessons in English, Math Olympiad courses, all kinds of study-abroad and travel-abroad programs, summer camps, and internships.