Competing for Approval, part 5 and done!

I didn't think I would ever get tired of not writing real posts, but I did. So this Part 5 is going to be hella long (the rest of the story/paper) and then we'll get back to our original programming (cruel commentary on other peoples' lives as well as my own). Lovely.

"Look What I Can Do!" - Competing for Approval part 5
(Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4)


I wondered why my personal satisfaction wasn’t enough to please me. I kept reminding myself that I was putting a lot into this internship: taking an hour and a half long commute (each way) to come to an unpaid internship where I entered data and made copies of DVDs. I stayed later than most people in the office, did more than my share of the work, and I had specifically refused to reduce my workload at school by taking an independent study. I knew I was working hard. But I never knew if [Supervisor] noticed. If he wanted more from me he never let on, and I was exhausted from trying to figure out what else I could offer.

I couldn’t tell how much of the competition between [Willa] and I was fabricated: was she consciously trying to undermine me, or was it possible that her attitude was actually genuine and I was competing with a ghost? The rivalry seemed real enough, yet though her emails always felt a little off to me, they never actually contained hostile words. Still, undermining coworkers can be done in deliberate yet indirect ways, such as through failing to transmit important information. [Willa] could always defend herself by calling her behavior inadvertent, and nobody could prove otherwise. There was no way I could know her intentions.

I felt marginalized again when [Willa] arrived at the office on a Thursday, her day off. “What’s going on?” I asked, shocked to see her.

“I’m here for the Women’s panel for the [Company] conference,” she explained. I hadn’t heard of it. [Willa] poked her head out of the dub room door and saw [Supervisor]’s empty desk. “Do you know where [Supervisor] is?”

“No. Is he going, too?” I asked, hoping I had effectively hidden the edge behind my voice.

“Yeah, we’re going together.” She showed me the email with the panel description.

“Cool.” I felt rejected. It sounded as though this had been [Willa]’s idea, and had she been going alone I wouldn’t have cared all that much. But she had planned to go with [Supervisor], on a day they both knew I would be in the office. Even if [Willa] disliked me, which she had never blatantly let on, [Supervisor] could have invited me.

“Let me see if I can register,” I said, hoping I sounded cheerful.

[Willa] came closer and leaned over the back of my chair at the computer monitor. “I don’t know if they’ll still let you in.”

“It says to just click here…” I clicked the hyperlink and was thanked for my reservation via Internet Explorer.

We went to the conference together, and I stayed alone for a few minutes afterward to grab a cookie from the snack table. [Willa] was in the office when I returned to gather my things.

“So, have you applied to any jobs?” I asked, curious to hear what her post-grad plans were.

“Yeah.”

“What kinds of places?”

“Oh, you know. Tons.” [Willa] appeared to be focused on checking her email. I hadn’t been that curious, but I still felt a little shut down. I waited for [Willa] to get off the computer so I could email her a file before I left, and we eventually started talking about our last days. “[Supervisor] told me that your last day was the third,” [Willa] said as she gathered her belongings.

“Really? Maybe I’ll ask him about that; I was planning on staying until the tenth, but I really could use a break.” A couple minutes later, [Willa] mentioned the summer interns. “When do they start?” I asked.

“Sometime in mid-June, I think.”

“That’s weird. I’d probably start whenever [Supervisor] asked me to.”

[Willa] turned around to face me, in the hall outside the dub room. “Why?” She sounded defensive. “It’s supposed to follow your school schedule.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I’d just start whenever they wanted me. I don’t really care when my school schedule is; I’d just try to be available when they needed me.”

[Willa] crossed her arms and said, condescendingly, “You know, that’s kind of hypocritical of you.”

I was a little confused by her use of a word that I found to be rather rude. “Why do you say that?” I asked, resisting the urge to say something inappropriate in return.

“You just said you were going to ask to leave early, but then you said you would come early if you were a summer intern.”

“That doesn’t make me hypocritical.”

[Willa] started to walk away. “I’m just saying, I’ve had like a million internships, and my way has always worked for me.”

I didn’t appreciate her bringing up past experience as some sort of wand of authority. “Okay, well I’ve had five internships, and my way has worked for me, too. I don’t think it matters, I was just saying what I would do.” I followed her at a distance, noticing that a couple of the assistants were watching us from their cubicles. As she rounded the corner to leave, I stayed in place.

“Are you staying here?” She asked, looking reluctant to wait any longer.

“Yeah, just to put my things together; you can go.” I wanted to avoid taking the elevator with her.

I struggled for the next few days to make sense of what had happened. Was this event a confirmation of my beliefs that [Willa] disliked me? If she disliked me, was it necessarily because she was competing with me or undermining me at work? Or had I been unwelcoming after miscalculating her intentions and pressured her to become competitive? If I had a more positive evaluation of myself and my abilities, perhaps I wouldn’t feel the need for [Supervisor]’s approval or interpret my interactions with [Willa] as antagonistic.

Yet there were structural factors in the internship that encouraged competition rather than collaboration. Finding out that I had been [Supervisor]’s first choice before I started made me feel as though the position was more rightfully mine than [Willa]’s; what would have happened if my schedule had been different? She would have been replaced by someone with a more flexible schedule. Starting us weeks apart gave [Willa] the advantage of learning her tasks, meeting [Supervisor], and establishing the dub room before I arrived, which immediately made me feel as though [Willa] was thought of as the primary intern.

Poor communication was another result of the internship’s structure: since [Willa] and I worked on opposite schedules, we were very rarely able to interact in person. Our relationship was mediated almost entirely by phone and written word. Furthermore, we had no shared experiences; we were unable to joke about what [Supervisor] said in the development meeting, or go to lunch together. Such disconnection made it much easier to view [Willa] as an enemy or an agent fulfilling a role, and made miscommunications more frequent as we were unable to clarify opinions that may have been misinterpreted.

Competition could also have been enhanced because we were expected to perform the same tasks; if the pitch log was my sole responsibility, I never would have resented [Willa] for neglecting the stack of pitches. Had our responsibilities been divided differently, we may have been encouraged to measure success in terms of self improvement, rather than our ability to one-up each other. Focusing on our achievement rather than our desire to see coworkers fail would likely increase productivity; though competition may foster excellence in some environments, I found that it increased my desire to spend time manipulating people into giving me the approval I wanted. [Willa] successfully gained approval while being minimally productive. I became more invested in appearing to be a serious, hard-working intern than I was with learning about television development. Also, since [Willa] and I were competing with each other, it was unlikely that we would be able to collaborate effectively or develop a supportive, trusting relationship.

I rarely considered the ways in which class, gender, race, sexual orientation, or class ranking affected the interactions between [Willa] and me. [Willa] may have felt pressured to compete with me because she was a senior and viewed the internship as a potential means to obtain a job at [Network] (she did apply for one, and was not selected). Perhaps her family or peers, past experiences with sports or work have encouraged her to compete with her peers. In the future, I hope to avoid work environments where structural factors are likely to encourage competition. I would seek out settings which encourage personal achievement, collaboration, and positive relationships with coworkers. I would personally like to reduce my dependency on approval from superiors as a basis for satisfaction and emotional well-being.
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