POSTCARD FROM NEW YORK: Finding Responsibility

NEW YORK—I am spending the summer trying to figure out how fruit flies smell. That’s right: I am studying how those pesky flies always manage to root out the delicious food in your kitchen. Now, I’ll admit, the job doesn’t sound glamorous. There’s no rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, no opportunity to travel the world and certainly very little money involved. But, as summer jobs go, I’ve done a lot worse. Actually, it’s the best job I’ve ever had.

At first, I didn’t plan on spending my summer with flies, or in any laboratory for that matter. When I was younger, I used to dream of being a research scientist. But several years ago, I spent a summer working in a lab where I spent the whole day crushing mouse food and then running mice in mazes before they were killed for further study. Besides building nice forearms from my constant grinding with mortar and pestle, the summer taught me a lot: mice do not make wonderful conversationalists, and whatever else you do as a scientist, do not name your mice. It is a lot harder to watch Freddie die for an experiment than an anonymous mouse. After that experience, I felt I had learned enough about science research to cross it off my list of potential career paths for good.

Consequently, my summer job search this year became a hunt for an internship that involved science but would keep me as far away from the lab as possible. Before leaving school, I had planned to spend the summer in Washington, D.C., interning at a swanky new public policy institute where I would be studying the problem of nuclear proliferation from Russia to rogue nations. The job was a dream come true: it sounded fresh, stimulating and totally free from lab work. However, when that job fell through at the last minute, I found myself facing a Harvard student’s greatest fear: having nothing to do for the summer.

Desperation leads to strange decisions. Despite my previous lab experience, when I found a job opening in a fly lab at Rockefeller University, I jumped at the chance. Any job would be better than three months of sitting at home with daytime TV (shudder). So, despite having sworn never to don a lab coat again, I steadied my resolve, and again picked up the pipette.

When I began my job, I was prepared for the worst. I had nightmares of an eternity of fly-sorting. Or perhaps I would get the auspicious job of bagging radioactive waste. Or maybe if I were lucky I would change fly cages all day. My only consolation was that it would be a 9-to-5 job, and there would be no way that I could feel emotional attachment for a fly.

Yet for the first time in my long string of internship experiences, my fears proved unwarranted. Within the first few days, my boss had me performing experiments for my own small project. I became engrossed in learning as much as possible about the molecular biology techniques used in the lab. For all purposes, I became a scientist. My 40-hour week quickly expanded to 60 hours, and I did not even notice the difference. Now, I even go in on Sunday afternoons to prepare experiments for the week.

Career advice at Harvard has always been spotty and conflicted. But the one piece of advice everyone seems to agree upon is that the Holy Grail of internships is one that gives an intern exposure to a career that he or she could really love. While this ideal may be the mantra of the Office of Career Services, it is certainly hard to come by. Have any of these advisors actually experienced an internship? Have they ever felt the eternal tick of seconds that make the hours between 2 and 3 p.m. seem like ten lifetimes? Have they ever made copies for the third day in a row? Certainly, they have never ground mouse chow. With most internships consisting of nothing more than glorified grunt work, it seems hard to believe that any internship could really give a dose of wonderful career.

The expectations surrounding most internships far exceed the actual career exposure they provide to students. Most employers hire interns as an act of charity, because there is nothing interns are actually qualified to do. But somehow the artificial programs and piles of make-work are supposed to give us glimpses of our future lives. I don’t mean to say that internships are a waste of time; I just think they are falsely advertised. Internships can give students a glimpse of a new career, but most of them give a skewed picture.

My job this summer has been the exception. I had no expectations for the internship, but it has turned out to be the best job I’ve ever had. And it’s not the particulars of the job that make it so wonderful. While it’s true that I love science, fly olfaction probably would not have been my first choice to study. What makes my job so wonderful is that I have responsibilities, great people to work with and a real idea of what it is like to be a scientist in the lab. It’s not about the prestige of the internship or any recognizable name of the organization. The important part was to dive head first into a real job. And, for the first time, I’m not yearning to go back to school. Who knows? I may even wind up being a scientist after all.

Robert J. Fenster ’03, a philosophy concentrator in Eliot House, is associate editorial chair of The Crimson. He is living in New York this summer, although he doesn’t know it, because he never sees the light of day.