1. The Mom. The first person you’ll meet is the “mom.” From day one, she’ll take you under her wing, show you the ropes and be your biggest fan. She’ll cheer you on throughout your internship and offer her condolences if you screw up and, just like your real mom, she’ll be there to tell you everything will be okay.

2. The Spy. The second person you will meet is the “spy.” The spy is someone who sits close in proximity to you, close enough that they can watch your every move. They will listen in on your phone calls, monitor what is on your computer screen and report every mistake to your supervisor.

3. The Mentor. The third person you will come across is the mentor. This person is far different from the “mom” in the fact that they won’t try to sugarcoat things; they will tell you how it is. They’re going to give it to you straight up, and they won’t be serving it on a silver platter. This person wants you to succeed and knows what it’s like to be in your shoes, and they’ve got plenty of criticism to throw your way—and while it may sometimes sound wrong, it’s for all the right reasons.

4. The Know-It-All-Intern. The fourth person you will meet at your internship is the know-it-all-intern. No matter how hard you try to avoid her, she’ll end up in your path—and step on your toes in the process. Her ideas are always better than yours; she always beats you to the punches; and your supervisor always idolizes her more than you.

5. The Cute Delivery Boy. The last person you will meet is the cute delivery boy. You’ll get to know him well, since you get to handle packages as an intern. Offering a friendly, “Hey, how’s it goin’,’” he will quickly become the one person who keeps you sane.

When I first started this internship in December, there were only a handful of other girls with me. We spent most of our days interning together gossiping quietly behind our computer screens, venting angrily about the ridiculous tasks we were asked to do, and showing each other funny YouTube clips to pass the time. For the entire spring semester, we bonded in a way only unpaid jobless college graduates can: we shared tips on how to get jobs and which websites had the best job postings, we discussed the different interviews we had gone on, and made fun of the other editors in the room with us. We became Facebook friends and followed each other on Twitter, and eventually, we started going out for dinner and drinks throughout Manhattan.

And at the end of the semester, when their internships had come to an end and I was the only one left at the magazine, I came to the sad realization that it was time to make new intern friends.

For a little while, I was one of the only interns at the magazine. I missed my friends from before – there wasn’t anyone to go on 5 o’clock coffee runs with – but while I couldn’t wait for the other interns to start, a part of me liked having all the responsibility. The summer interns started to slowly trickle in at the end of May, until suddenly one day I walked in and they were everywhere.

It felt odd at first, being the only intern who had experience at the magazine. I told the other girls how to do the different things we were told to do, but some of them made their own way of doing things and I was left wishing the old batch of interns was still around. The whole group of us just didn’t get along the way the winter interns had… and I’m not going to lie, it was a big disappointment.

Making friends with the girls you intern with is a huge plus when you start an internship. After all, who can understand what you’re going through more than the girl who’s right next to you on the Starbucks line for the late-night editor coffee run? Not to mention it’s a great networking tool – a lot of these girls will go on to work for various other magazines or PR firms, and knowing people in different companies is always helpful. Really, it’s just nice to come in to work and have someone to giggle with over silly celebrity gossip – it passes the time and makes not getting paid just a little bit easier.

But at the same time, it’s almost difficult to make friends with these girls knowing that all of you want the same exact thing: a job offer. And obviously, not all of you can get it. The group of girls I work with at the moment are ambitious, and a little bit intimidating. Two of the girls are tall, skinny, and the kind of pretty that you can’t ignore. A few of the other girls have resumes that make me feel like going back to school. A couple of other girls snatch up events so fast I’ve found myself checking my email more than a few times each hour. And I’m starting to feel slightly territorial – like, listen girls, I’ve been interning here since December. If a position opens up, it’s MINE.

But despite all that (and some passing urges to trip the other interns on the way into big meetings) we are all warming up to one another. There have been a few gossiping sessions in the library, a few “laugh so hard I cry” moments at my desk, and even talk of all of us going out for drinks. Maybe some people would choose being competitive over being friendly, but in the end I think I’d rather have the other interns on my side.

Yes, my future is on the line here, but having friends at work makes the present so much more bearable.

[F or most college students, summer means one thing: an unpaid internship. We’ve been there and we feel your pain. Whether you’re making copies, making coffee runs, or just trying to make your mark on the industry of your dreams, it’s much easier to get through it all with a little help from your (CollegeCandy) friends. So come back every week to listen/sympathize with/vent with our anonymous intern as she does her thang at a big time magazine in New York City. Because, let’s be honest, what else do you have to do in that cubicle all day?]

It’s no secret that interning can be a dull job. In fact, sometimes internships get such a bad rep that we forgot that they can also have some pretty amazing perks. In the field of journalism and magazine writing, one of those perks is being given the opportunity to cover red carpet events. At my internship, it’s hands down everyone’s favorite thing to do and for obvious reasons. I mean, free alcohol, free finger foods, a chance to meet celebrities AND reporting credit? What could be better?

I’ve met tons of other over-eager interns out there while I’m working the carpet and while some of them try to act all cool and casual, when it comes down to it, we’re all super excited to have a chance to talk to some of our favorite celebs, especially when it’s someone we love. (When me and another intern met Ashley Olsen the other night, we were both squealing like 12-year-olds at a Justin Bieber concert).

So what’s my point? Most of the time that excitement turns into telling all of our friends, family and basically anyone who will listen to us (I slipped it into a convo with the guy serving me pizza the other day), gush about our red carpet moments. And most of the time that gushing pisses people off and makes them think that we’re name-dropping fools who can’t stop bragging about our awesome accomplishments.

Take this week, for example. It was like the holy grail for me. It began with a music event that included Jason Mraz and Trey Songz (both surprisingly very attractive and a little flirty in person); continued with a star-studded Yves Saint Laurent party where Ashley Olsen, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Alexis Bledel and Whitney Port were in attendance; and ended with an interview with Derek Jeter, one of my favorite celeb guys (GO YANKEES!). So you can only imagine how excited I was all week…. and yes, I admit to one too many Facebook status updates and to blowing up my friend’s Twitter pages with all my observations.

But I wasn’t trying to brag! Honest.

Here’s the thing: covering events is (usually) easily the best part of any magazine internship. We interns spend 10-12 hours a day in an office on a regular basis, sitting in front of a computer doing nothing more than developing a nice case of carpal tunnel, so when the time comes to get out and do some real journalistic stuff, it’s pretty exciting. All of those years of early morning college classes and hours of transcribing has finally paid off when I’m standing in front of some of my fave celebs, interviewing them. And given all of the hard and sometimes boring work we do all day (for zero pay), can’t a girl get some bragging rights?

I can’t speak for all interns, but I know for myself that these moments are so exciting I just can’t keep them in. I’m not trying to brag or name-drop or show off – I just want to share my excitement and enthusiasm (which has been pent up for days while sitting silently at a table waiting for an assignment) with anyone who will listen. And if that means spewing it all over Facebook, well, so be it! I’ve worked really hard to get these opportunities so I feel it is my right to be excited without my friends’ eye rolling bringing me down.

I mean, come on, after months of getting coffee, getting yelled at and being totally ignored by (some of) my superiors, let me have my moment of glory, will you? Sometimes it’s the only thing keeping me going.

It’s internship hunting season and, thanks to the economy, it’s more competitive than ever. That means it’s more important than ever to make a really good first impression. Being that I spent the past week alone sifting through over 100 applications for CollegeCandy’s summer internship positions, I know a thing or twelve about what makes a successful application.

If you want to spend your summer beefing up your resume, learning the ropes and, most likely, getting someone else’s coffee, take a few of these things into consideration:

Stand Out.
Most internship coordinators receive a lot of applications, making it incredibly difficult to remember every single one they looked at. If you want to be remembered, you gotta stand out.

Resume Do:
Move away from the traditional/boring resume format and try doing something a little different. (You can find ideas online.) I once received a resume that had a great pop of bright green on the top and a very simple green line down the left side. Three years later, I still remember that applicant.

Resume Don’t:
Say something stupid. My friend was recently reading through internship applications for a position at her advertising firm. Under “interests” one applicant listed: “Facebook creeping, collecting bar wrist bands, and beer pong.” Not only was she under 21, but she was completely unprofessional. Yes, she was trying to be creative and stand out, but this was clearly the wrong way to do it.

Cover Letter Do:
Writing cover letters is annoying, yes, but they are incredibly important. Don’t just copy and paste a generic cover letter and send it out to every job you are applying for. We aren’t stupid and it makes us feel like you really aren’t that serious about the position.  Take some time and think about the company, the job and the industry, and tailor your cover letter accordingly. Also, a little anecdote at the beginning can go a long way in getting someone’s attention.

Cover Letter Don’t:
Reiterate everything that we already saw on your resume. If we wanted a list of your accomplishments, well, we’ve already got that. Also, don’t send it without spellchecking first. Seems obvious, but I can’t tell you how many cover letters (for writing positions!) I’ve read with glaring errors.

Be Professional:
No matter the company culture, you must act and dress professionally. My advertising friend (again) recently interviewed a potential intern who showed up wearing jeans and Uggs. UGGS! While the ad industry may be more laid back than most when it comes to attire, it is totally unprofessional and disrespectful to show up in the same clothes you wore to class.

Prepare for the Interview:
Beyond just coming up with your biggest personal flaw and memorizing all the skills you’ve acquired from previous positions, spend a bit of time learning about the company and all of their accomplishments. This not only shows the interviewer that you are genuinely interested in the company, but can also be very flattering for them.  While most people won’t admit this, flattery often does go a long way.

Send a Thank You Note:
We don’t want anything sappy, cheesy or fake, but simply dropping a quick thank-you email a few days after an interview not only shows us respect, but also gets you back fresh in our minds. And after interviewing 6 other people since we spoke to you, that could be the difference between getting the coveted internship and ending up in the forgettable pile.

She's mine, all mine! Mwahahahaha.

After three long summers of unpaid interning (and people say slavery is illegal!) I’m finally getting my own interns tomorrow. How quickly the tables have turned.

Of course I’m using the phrase “my interns” very loosely. One of the companies I work for is getting interns and I’ve been placed in charge of supervising them. And considering the entire company operates through e-mail and Facebook pokes, I’m pretty sure supervising them consists of g-chatting them weekly and asking “wassup.”

So unfortunately for me (and my dreams) there will be no coffee runs, copy machine assignments, or endless paper recycling drills. Unfortunately for my interns, I will be requiring that they refer to me as madam each time they address me in person and thy honorable Jenni each time they begin an e-mail. I’m only a few years older than them and I look 13 so I have to make it clear from the start that I’m in charge.

In fact, I might just drill that point home by adding  a dress code chapter to the intern guidebook (an 80-page manual that chronicles my life from birth to present) that I so generously wrote for them. Nothing too fancy of course, basic black-tie casual attire should do.

I don’t plan to be a complete lunatic as their internship-coordinator-life skills-director-inspirational-influencer (just the new title I added to my resume). I want them to leave this internship with crazy experiences that they can eventually exaggerate successfully on a resume. After all, I never would have gotten where I am today if I hadn’t listed this job on my resume as CollegeCandy Founder, Owner, & Contributor — it sounds a lot flashier and important than self-obsessed blogger.

The learning begins early tomorrow and I have a busy first day orientation planned for them that involves reading about the company, prank calling my friends at work, and commenting excessively on this post. While I can’t even begin to predict how much my interns will have learned by this time next week, I can safely predict that I may be demoted and will no longer be able to call myself an internship-coordinator-life skills-director-inspirational-influencer.

Learning the ropes of an internship is one thing, but becoming accustomed to a big city for the first time while starting an internship can make those first few days all the more nerve wracking.

After scoring two internships in New York City last summer, I couldn’t have been more excited – and then the realization of living alone in a city I didn’t know anything about terrified me. From the moment my plane landed at La Guardia, I was a nervous wreck until I made it through my first few days.

By the end of my time as a summer intern, though, I had the interning and city gag down pat. In fact, I couldn’t get enough, so I decided to come back to New York in January to intern again. With three different internships under my belt in one of the biggest cities in the world, here are some tips that helped me become a big city intern faster than I thought was possible.

Timing is everything: Since most big cities rely on public transportation, you will need to leave earlier than you normally would anywhere else. For example, if it takes you ten minutes to walk from your residence to your company’s building, you should leave twenty minutes early – at least for the first few days – to make sure you get there on time. Also, who knows what can happen on any given day. Traffic could hold you up one day, a morning rain shower could crowd the subways, or a longer than anticipated line at Starbucks might hold you back while waiting for your morning Venti Mocha. Always give yourself some leeway because this way, you won’t be late and you will save yourself the stress of worrying about getting to the job on time.

Transportation shortcuts exist: Most transportation systems, such as the subway and buses in major cities from New York to San Francisco, have websites that you can find all the information you will ever need at. However, most helpful is the popular HopStop, a website that will tell you what subway trains to take, what bus to transfer to, and how many blocks you need to walk to make it to your destination and how long all of that moving and shaking will take you. It not only informs you about maintenance hold-ups, but it will give you different routes for you to pick from. And to top it all off, you can use HopStop on your cell phone. You won’t get lost with this website in your life, I promise.

Make friends with the doormen: Whether your company’s office has a doorman or you are running errands for an author out of her apartment, get to know the people working the front desk or building doors. Not only will you have a smiling face to greet you in the morning, but you will have someone that knows the city well to direct you in a time of need. This past January, the doormen at the apartment building I constantly ran errands out of were some of the nicest people I met my entire internship. Constantly helpful, they always made me laugh no matter how cold it was in New York or how many boxes I had to carry blocks away. They will brighten your day, and by talking to them, you will brighten their day.

Band-Aids make good friends, too: I can’t begin to count the amount of band-aids I went through during all my internships. It didn’t matter how old and broken in my shoes were, they gave me big, ugly blisters. Why? Well, because the amount of walking I did while interning was far beyond the normal amount of any day around a college campus. I learned quickly to keep a box of Band-aids in my over-sized bag and everyone should do the same. Trust me, you don’t want to be the girl limping with a bloody shoe. Also, since interns usually deal with a lot of paper, nasty paper cuts are guaranteed and you won’t want to have bloody fingers when handing faxes into your boss.

Keep a detailed notebook: Purchase a small spiral notebook and keep it in your bag the entire internship experience. While you write tasks or errands you need to run throughout the day in it, you can also keep addresses of locations you visit, phone numbers and other contact information, and any thoughts you feel need to be recorded all in the same place. If the notebook has pockets, slide in all the business cards you get. Notebooks also come in handy because you can write directions down in it, which saves you time and embarrassment from opening a huge subway map in the middle of a metro station to see where you need to go. At the end of your internship, you will have pages filled of duties you completed (which will make you feel good about yourself) along with a lot of other information that could one day come in handy (for example, a lot of the locations I visited during my summer internships were places I wanted to go again – and I was able to reference them from my notes during my winter internship). This is a good way to keep all your stuff organized so you aren’t leaving things all over the place.

Keep up the pace: Internships in big cities tend to go at a very fast pace. Make sure you keep up. Some days it will honestly suck and you will probably hate it – but you are there to learn. Soak everything in – the good, the bad, the bloody socks from your new shoes, the compliments from your new boss – everything. You were picked to be an intern for a reason, and as long as you remember that, you shouldn’t stop working hard to show that you really do belong there.

Make the most of it: A major perk of interning in a big city is actually being in a big city! You will have a ton of culture and excitement at your finger tips, so live it up! Although working may wear you out, make sure you spend time seeing what the city has to offer. Not only will you gain immense amounts of work experience, but you will do so in a cultural environment – there really isn’t much more you can ask for during an internship!

I used to think Teen Vogue was the best shit on the stands. All that high-class style and gossip for two bucks a pop? I signed up for a five – year subscription. I found the haughty content amusingly hilarious and would crave my monthly society updates on things like Bunny Von Hartzelcarter – Markstein’s cotillion and the eating habits and bedroom – decorating abilities of obscure young porcelain actresses.

Unlike its mother, the almighty Vogue, Teen Vogue featured fashions that were young, cool and almost affordable. A girl can dream, and I’d rather dream about a $300 Philip Lim denim trapeze dress than a $4000 quilted leather jacket by Alexander McQueen.

But this month’s issue is a little ridiculous. Plaguing the cover are the perpetual interns, LC of the OC and her sidekick, Whitey. I mean Whitney. It’s Whitney! Seriously, though, when are their internships going to end? They’ve been going at it for like, seven years. Hey, I’m an intern too. But you don’t see me posing for multiple covers of a national magazine. No, I file. Like normal interns, who only intern for a few months and then go back to college. Remember college? Oh yeah, I’m sure they manage to balance college with free high fashion, trips to Paris, long lunches at Urth Cafe and that ugly dude they all dated. There’s surely enough time in the day.

I guess it must be a slow news month in pre – pubescent fashion if LC and Whitney have to go on the cover again. These girls are just so uninteresting and uninspiring. Don’t for one minute, Teen Vogue, try to pass them off as “normal” because they have unpaying apprenticeships where they have to fetch coffee once in awhile.

In other news, grey is in for fall. Great.