Interned

This summer, I landed an internship at a company I’d always dreamed about. At the start, everything felt perfect the team was friendly, people would talk and engage. But as the weeks went by, I started seeing the reality. My mentor never seemed interested in genuinely solving my problems. Whenever I’d share updates or ask for help, she’d just avoid it or brush things off with random things. Major issues in my project were ignored by her, even though the entire team, including the manager, knew about these blockers. Because of this, I lost 3–4 weeks struggling with blockers while no one actually helped. Honestly, my communication wasn’t the best since this was my first job. I thought putting in hard work would be enough, but I soon realised it’s more about networking and “being seen.” Even so, I completed my project completely from start to finish, pushing thousands of lines of code in the last five days before my internship ended. After all that effort, I didn’t get a return offer. The HR gave me random feedback which wasn’t even related to my actual work. It was clear my mentor and manager had already made up their minds. She never gave me any feedback during the entire internship. Even after it ended, I reached out to her, but she just ignored my message. She’s only skilled at looking good in front of upper management. This whole experience has taken a major mental toll on me. Even now, months after rejection, I feel like a failure. Every time I open LeetCode or even see job openings from that company on LinkedIn, it messes with my mind. Most interns got converted to full-time, even those who barely worked meanwhile, I did everything right and still got left behind. I’d be labelled as a failure in front of other interns, the team, and even networks within the company man. Although I did get another offer, working at that company was my dream. That dream was completely destroyed because of these people. Whenever I try to talk about it, people just give me sympathy and say, “You’ll get better opportunities.” But they don’t realise life doesn’t throw big opportunities every day. It hurts even more because of how things turned out there. Sometimes I wish I had never interned at that place.