5 months into an 8-month internship: No work, zero support, and a toxic coworker. Am I wrong for just riding it out?
Hey everyone, just need to vent and get some perspective.
I’m currently 5 months into an 8-month internship in the IT department of a non-tech company (I leave at the end of August). For context, most of my coworkers are nearing retirement age.
The thing is, I constantly reach out for tasks and almost never get anything. I’m taking classes at night, so honestly, I’ve just been using the daytime hours to grind through my schoolwork and study.
When I do actually receive a task, it comes with minimal instruction. If I reach out to my mentor to ask a simple clarifying question, it takes them 1 to 2 business days just to get back to me.
On top of that, there's an Indian coworker on my team who loves to jump on my mistakes and point them out directly to our manager. Or just blame me for their bad mentoring. I.e. I was supposed to document fields which I did. But they didn't like the format. They said it was my fault and there is some 'trust' that I was supposed to do it.
But if I try to ask this same coworker a question about the project, I either get completely ignored or receive a super vague response.
I’ve been documenting everything to cover myself, but I really don't want to start any beef right now. I’m swamped with tests and exams and just don't have the energy for office drama. I also don’t see any reason to bring this up to management. This exact situation happened before with this coworker and someone else, and the manager ended up putting down the person who complained and just made their job way harder.
So far what I've been doing is just thanking them for pointing out the mistake without being defensive and fixing it without needing, as I find for me this saves me some mental bandwidth.
Question
Am I in the wrong for not spending my bandwidth on this? I feel like I'd rather use my mental bandwidth on school right now.