CW: inappropriate behaviour by someone in a position of power
This summer, Khadijah Ali, like many other students, undertook an internship. She was looking for a way to productively occupy her time during the long Oxford summer vacation, and to gain useful life skills, perhaps helping her to decide her future career. However, her experience was not a positive one. The issues she faced ranged from the poor design of the internship program to the inappropriate conduct of the person running the internship. All in all, the internship failed to live up to its own promises, and fell short of the expectations that she had going into it—and she really did have high hopes for her choice of summer project, not least because she thought it might be a great opportunity to “reconnect” with her roots (Khadijah, who has mostly grown up in the UK, describes herself as “half Indian”). With the goal that future potential interns would be able to learn from her experiences, Khadijah told The Oxford Blue all about her internship experience.
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Khadijah says that she chose the internship from among the international internships advertised on the Oxford Careers Service website because of the rigid structure—including professionally-run Hindi or Punjabi language classes—it advertised, as well as the opportunity to visit India. She invested a considerable amount of time into preparing for her internship (“make sure you leave plenty of time to organise your visa!” she warns), and had an initial Zoom interview with the organiser of the internship as well as communicating with them in advance over WhatsApp. This gave her a sense of confidence going into the internship. Unfortunately, the internship did not go on to meet these standards.
Khadijah told The Blue that the promised language classes stopped “abruptly” a couple of weeks into the internship. She also says that the internship “did not offer any proper training and guidance” to the interns and that “we weren’t all that well integrated into the school and we weren’t given an opportunity to sit in on lessons. In short, we didn’t have the tools to make the most of our internship, and that was disappointing.” There were other aspects that Khadijah did not feel were as advertised. “We weren’t given much freedom over our time, outside of our time spent in the school… [We] were getting chaperoned around everywhere, and weren’t allowed to walk into town and or do simple things for ourselves. As someone who is very independent, I didn’t feel comfortable having everything done for me.”
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More serious are Khadijah’s allegations around the internship organiser’s conduct. A series of issues eventually snowballed, such that some of Khadijah’s fellow interns left the programme early, citing safety concerns.
Khadijah first felt uncomfortable with the organiser the day of her arrival in India. She and another intern travelled on the same flight, and arrived before the other interns. They stayed the night in “an unexpectedly luxurious 4-star hotel” and took a dip in the pool before meeting the internship organiser for dinner. “[The organiser] kindly took us to a fancy restaurant, and filled us in on some interesting details about India and the internship. She told us that she had selected only 6 interns out of a pool of 30 candidates,” Khadijah reported. The atmosphere changed when Khadijah asked how the interns had been assigned their hosts. “The hosts were four male friends of hers in their mid-to-late twenties. She told us that she sent her friends the bios we had written and photos of us [but] that ‘they probably didn’t read [the bios]’ and ‘had probably picked us based on just our appearances’. It suddenly became clear why two brunettes and two blondes were paired together for different hosts. I felt deeply uncomfortable when she added that she knew her friends would flirt with us, and encouraged us to ‘have a summer fling’ and ‘to wander in and out of their bedrooms’ if we wanted to.”
Khadijah also speaks of feeling uncomfortable when the organiser mentioned during dinner that the town the interns were going to had “the second highest number of rape cases in India”.
Khadijah told The Blue, “that’s not exactly what you want to hear when you’ve just arrived in a new country.” She describes this first evening as “distressing” and added that, “ “at one point, our boss left the table to go to the toilet, and me and the other intern held hands across the table, panickily repeating ‘what the fuck’ to each other.”
According to Khadijha, issues with the organiser discussing inappropriate topics re-occurred after that first night. “One day, she came into the office and told us some rather intimate details about her ex, making me feel slightly uncomfortable, yet again. She drew a mind map on the board of who our hosts had hooked up with in the area. Admittedly, we all became very animated and invested in this juicy gossip, but it was beginning to become clear that the boundary between being our boss and being our friend had started to blur,” Khadijah said.
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“Things got worse when our first excursion rolled around. I was really excited for this. We were off to the beautiful hill station of Mussoorie, and we were going to have a chance to explore the town. I actually really enjoyed this part of the trip. We went on a lovely long hike and took a cable car up to some viewpoints. It was nice to get some fresh air and be allowed to walk outside by ourselves. But then, at night, our boss chose to sleep in the same bed as an intern,” Khadijah claims.
“She got into the bed after that intern was already asleep, and I imagine it was a shock to the intern when she woke up and found her boss sharing a bed with her. I found it really bizarre, because there was no need for her and the intern to be in that double bed together. There were a couple of single beds available that some of us were using, but we could have swapped around so that two interns were sharing the bed, which is what I did the next night, because this made the other intern more comfortable. This seemed to offend our boss, and she questioned where she was supposed to sleep even though my bed was free.”
“I wasn’t really sure what to make of it.” Khadijah said. “In the moment, there was a funny side to the bizarreness of the situation, but it was also obviously deeply inappropriate.”
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Khadijah also says that the internship organiser did nothing to intervene when the interns’ hosts drunk-drove the interns on more than one occasion. “The first time this happened was on our first night in the town after we went to one of the hosts’ farms for some drinks. We had absolutely no alternative option for getting back home…”
“Our boss was there on all of the occasions when we were driven back home drunk, and she never offered us alternative transport. We knew she had lived in the UK and US, so she must have known that drunk-driving was not something which would be acceptable to us,” Khadijah added.
She also reported that one of the other interns eventually raised the drunk-driving issue with the internship organiser, but Khadijah feels that “our boss’s response was less than sub-par.”
Khadijah says the organiser “did not apologise” and “instead of addressing the issue […] she became defensive, didn’t empathise with [us] and aggravated the whole situation.”
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It was after this conversation that Khadijah says two of the interns decided to return to the UK due to safety concerns. She says that this prompted the organiser to address the drunk-driving issue with internship hosts, although said that “things were uncomfortable between some of the hosts and interns” as a result of how it was handled.
Following the departure of some of the interns, Khadijah reports that the relationship between the organiser and the remaining interns deteriorated considerably. “We barely saw her in school, apart from her occasionally coming in to take some photos for the internship Instagram account, or to share some more drama about her ex. She would also gossip about the two interns who left, who she had blocked on social media, and she would blame one of the interns for the whole situation, claiming that [the intern] had manipulated us, and that [the intern] ‘enjoyed’ the drama.”
“[The organiser] also asked me on more than one occasion if I knew where the interns were, because she didn’t believe that they had actually returned to the UK. This left me feeling uncomfortable, because it was like I was having to pick sides between the interns and her.”
Khadijah says that she became increasingly uncomfortable with her role on the internship and her professional relationship with the organiser. She felt the interns were “used” in “a big marketing gimmick” and that the organiser “didn’t acknowledge any of the work we had put into this project.” Khadijah also says that there were issues getting forms signed, despite this being a requirement for the interns’ funding from the internship office.
“Somehow, the request turned into an argument,” she said. She alleges that in response, she and another intern were removed from two group chats by the internship organiser, including one which was their main means of communication with their hosts. “She also cancelled my friend’s SIM-card. Had we not both been together, this could have been incredibly dangerous, and we could not believe how she had gone out of her way to put us in an unsafe situation.”
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Khadijah told The Blue that she reported her experiences to the Careers Service when she returned to the UK, since all interns are asked to fill in feedback surveys after the completion of their internships. The Careers Service has since removed the internship from their website. The Oxford Careers Service Internship Office have also provided the following comment:
“We facilitate approximately 1,700 global internships each year, exclusively for Oxford students. Rarely, things do go wrong, for example, because communication is difficult or because hosts are not sufficiently equipped to provide students with a good experience. Students are encouraged to talk to us when they encounter problems so we can support them and facilitate a suitable outcome. Very rarely, complaints are so serious (usually around student safety) that we cease to work with hosts. We obtain feedback from all the programmes we run, and satisfaction levels are very high. Of the students who provided feedback for the 2022 Summer Internship Programme for example, 97% stated that the programme offered ‘high quality internships’; 99% said that the internships were ‘exciting’; and 93% said they would recommend the Summer Internship Programme to a friend.”
Khadijah said that “she was surprised that the internship was even allowed to continue for the last five weeks” after two interns left citing safety concerns. “I am of course incredibly grateful to have had this opportunity and to have been given a grant to travel abroad, meet new people, and experience new cultures, but I also think that it’s important to share the less positive sides of my experience. I’m glad that action has been taken now, but I think myself and other students assume that there are more stringent checks in place, or that something might be done more quickly when the Careers Service learns about issues like drunk driving, and suggestions to flirt with our hosts.”