How to Make Up an Internship to Appease Your Parents

It’s May, and those of you with bad luck (and/or a bad resume) may still not have heard back from anywhere about summer internships. You may be feeling stressed out — Career Advancement is sending out mass emails twice a day, and if your family is anything like mine, your mother calls you twice a week to ask about your internship plans. (Every time, I check my email for updates, and every time I end up crying in the shower, my tears bleeding into the harsh, endless, rain, dissolving into nothing.) But be optimistic! There are a lot of jobs out there, and though your empty inbox on Handshake may suggest otherwise, you are probably qualified for at least one. But just in case you don’t get any offers by the end of the quarter — a possibility that, by now, must loom more and more with each passing hour — I’ve written this handy guide on making up an internship to satisfy your parents!

• Stop applying for the jobs you want and start applying for the jobs that don’t require cover letters.

Before you give up on finding a real job entirely, you should make one last, panicked attempt and apply to everything you can find. But writing a full application takes too long. From now on, you apply only to the positions that require a resume and nothing else. Sure, some of these might not be jobs you actually want, but as the saying goes: unemployed millennials can’t be choosers. Who cares if it’s a sales rep position but your major is astrophysics? It’s time to cast your net wide.

• Pick a city far from your hometown.

In the event that casting your net wide does not, in fact, get you a job, you’ll have to start working on that fake internship. But how would you hide that shame from your parents? Imagine if they asked to visit you — the horror! To best hide your secret, choose a city far, far away from your parents. Make sure it’s a real, semi-known place, but not somewhere they can get to easily — like Tempe, Arizona.

• Ask Jake from Bumble if you can stay at his place this summer, just for a bit.

If you’re like me and your parents track your location through GPS, it’d probably be best to stay in your “city of work” for the duration of your “internship”. Remember Jake from Bumble? You ghosted him two months ago when he said he “only kind of liked” Hotel Transylvania 3. He’s from Arizona. You could use that.

• Invent a startup and write your job description.

To make your fake internship believable, you’ll need proof that your job actually exists. You *could* just pretend that you’re working for a real company, but then your parents could look it up and ask questions. To avoid this problem, invent your own company — log onto Wix and make a fake website for a fake startup, and then put in a fake customer service email (that you’ll be managing) for good measure. Now all you need to do is write your own job description! To keep you parents from asking for ~fun summer internship group photos~, make up a position that wouldn’t logically lead to much social interaction. Examples include “zombie rats lab night shift technician” and “animated dating sim language reviewer”. Bonus: you’ll get some real experience with web design and writing, and you actually won’t be lying about that part where you’re spending the summer alone.

• Call your mother, smile through the Skype screen, and lie to the woman that raised you with her own sweat, blood, and tears.

You’re almost done. All you need to do is actually let your parents know about this cool internship you just got. So grit your teeth, smile through your guilt, and call your mother. She’ll be overjoyed to hear that you’re finding success in life. Then go into the shower, cry, and let your tears disappear as the apathetic waterfall of the shower swallows them whole.