The Waiting Room

My new duties at the consulate include going through every single magazine, newspaper, and journal we have, finding articles relevant to a list of industries that we get a majority of our inquiries from, photocopying them, and putting these articles into a binder.  That binder then goes into a storage room (that I just finished reorganizing for cosmetic, not functional, reasons) where no one will ever know its there, because all of the information will be obsolete by the end of the summer, and will need to be replaced constantly by whatever unfortunate intern follows me.

The undergraduate intern that I work with, meanwhile, is creating company profiles, scheduling meetings, conducting market research, and doing all the things that make working for free at a consulate interesting.

Graduate student = physical, menial, boring labor with no bearing on a future career
Undergraduate student = interesting, mentally challenging research with direct career applications

Oh well, I'm having lunch at the Rotary Club next week with the Consul General, so =P