
Don't be a UN intern - desertqueen
https://desertqueensarah.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/dont-be-a-un-intern/
======
ramanujam
I was an intern at the UNHQ in New York city in 2010 and as a computer science
grad student, i was definitely the odd man out. Right from my middle school
days, i have always been intrigued by the UN and no one understood why a CS
grad student would pick the UN for an unpaid internship instead of a typical
tech company that paid $25-30+ an hour.

\- My batch had 300 interns from 70+ countries and almost every intern was
very talented and went to one of the top universities in the world. The
internship selection process was similar to grad school admissions (essays,
recommendations etc) and it was selective (around 5%). There were only a
handful of tech people and it wasn't hard for me to get in! Unlike me (someone
in tech), the internship was coveted for those in economics, international
affairs and several other fields.

\- Most people only see the irrelevant parts of UN where world leaders give
prejudiced talks in the general assembly but there is a lot more to UN than
that. UN plays a very important role in the world's peacekeeping, social
development, human rights and several other things that aren't very visible to
people living in developed nations.

\- As a programmer, i built some internal publishing tools using PHP but i
also got to wear suits and sit in group discussions at the world bank and with
ambassadors of several countries. I loved that part. Out of my own interest, i
also built an internal profile network for the interns and i learned a lot of
new things doing that.

\- The department that i worked at had many talented people who were well
qualified and were passionate about what they were doing and i am still in
touch with some. Of course, it is a large organization with a lot of red-
tapism with many inefficient departments. My internship made me realize I
didn't want to spend my 20s and 30s at the UN or any similar organization.

I probably spent around $8k-$10k out of my pocket to do the internship
(travel, food, rent etc). I wish the UN paid me for the work but looking back,
it was a very memorable experience and i would definitely do it again.

------
lighthawk
> They have long lost their professional ambition, and spend days in the
> office working on private projects, writing music, taking long lunches and
> in general killing their time until retirement. Most others are just average
> people, like you and me, that got trapped in the system and started drinking
> its Kool-Aid, over time becoming poisoned with it.

It sounds much like working in higher-ed or most government jobs. For that
matter, it could be describing some large corporate environments.

~~~
oconnor663
I think the same can happen almost anywhere. I've heard startup culture
described in the same way: people founding company after company trying to
"disrupt" something without caring what it is, trying to fit themselves into a
system defined by VC's.

I'm not sure there's any perfect way to avoid this kind of job. If what you
care about is sculpture or bird watching or travel, you probably won't find a
nice paying job that lets you flex your expertise. You _might_ , it's _been
done_ , but there's not the same kind of demand for renowned bird watching
authors as there is for doctors or lawyers or engineers.

So maybe the best we can say is this: If your _goal_ in taking a job is for it
to be a life's work, the thing you think about in your spare time, and the
kind of thing people remember you for, then you need to worry about this. You
need to watch out for systems that eat up your time and effort without
mattering, because there are lots of them. But if not, then you don't.

~~~
dnautics
Yeah, but the thing is even the most scelerotic, giant tech company (can think
of a few) are producing _something_ that _someone_ wants (even if that
customer base is dwindling or those wants may be silly - who are we to
judge?). So you at least get a sense that you are moving something
incrementally forward. It might be hard to say the same thing about parts of
the UN.

~~~
ljw1001
After you finish your TPS report, stop by my office and I'll tell you about
working 6 years of my life on a product nobody wanted.

------
stevoski
I have, unfortunately, too much inside experience personally or via close
friends of working inside NATO, UNICEF, and the ECB. All of the are
dysfunctional, soul-destroying places where talented, highly educated people
pass years without accomplishing much, all while drawing excellent salary and
conditions. Many people hate their jobs inside these organisations every day
but won't quit because the financial rewards are too great.

I got out.

~~~
m_fayer
I also got out.

There was a strange kind of resigned fatalism among the old-timers. When I
started voicing my discontent, I would hear the same sentiment from older
colleagues: "Oh yeah, I used to say the same thing when I was younger, and
then in the blink of an eye, it's 20 years later and I'm somehow still here."

------
bryanwb
This article is spot on about working for the UN. It matches my own
experience. The various organizations are sadly, for a number of reasons,
becoming less relevant and more sclerotic.

I don't fault the UN for not paying interns. There are lots of kids who think
it is glamorous and are willing to take unpaid posts just like in the music
industry, the U.S. Congress, and a number of other industries. If the UN _had_
to pay interns they simply wouldn't take them on in the first place.

The UN is much more poisonous than screwed than working for the US Gov. I
worked for the USG for 5 years (Dept of State) and had an excellent
experience. Govt bureaucracies are actually much more efficient than the UN as
they have voters to hold them accountable. Accountability for UN agencies is
practically nil.

------
jszymborski
> Arguing that a 5% effectiveness rate is better than nothing is like treating
> frostbite on the patient’s toe by cutting off the entire leg – no patient
> would agree to that.

I'm sorry, but there is a litany of reasons that analogy makes zero sense.

------
wbronitsky
My experience as a UN intern in NYC was incredibly similar. My department did
nothing of note, and the person leading the department would routinely harass,
disparage and humiliate her employees, sometimes in public. No one was even
competent, and people spent most of their time doing nothing. It was one of
the most demoralizing positions I have ever had, and was of course paid for
none of my time while living in Manhattan, which was a great financial burden.

That being said, I'm convinced this line on my resume has worked wonders for
me. I have switched industries twice (UN -> Non Profit -> Tech Software
Engineering) and in most of my interviews, people still ask me about it after
5ish years. While it would be hard to say for certain that it has gotten me
jobs, it does make my resume continue to stand out. This doesn't take away
from how unethical it is to not pay your workers, or how insane it is that
most of the UN does absolutely nothing but take most US tax dollars and pay
their employees (at least in NYC) an incredibly insane amount of money to do
nothing.

Edit: I want to make clear that there are hugely productive and beneficial
parts to the UN like UNHCR which runs refugee camps throughout the world. I
personally met the head of UNHCR, who was then a former Prime Minister of
Portugal, and he was one of the most impressive people I've ever met. He ran
over 150 refugee camps and knew each of them by name, location and how many
people were there. Incredible person doing a very important job. But this is
the exception, not the rule.

------
Pyxl101
What kind of oversight do these organizations have? Who are their "investors"
or "donors"?

It seems like organizations like this are not overseen for their
effectiveness. Why is measuring organizations for their effectiveness and
striving for effectiveness not a standard table-stakes expectation for an
organization of this size?

~~~
eloisant
Their "investors" are all the countries in the world:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations#Funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations#Funding)

But seriously, how would you measure effectiveness? There is nothing to
compare it to, and you can't never know for sure what wars it prevented
(because they didn't happen).

~~~
Pyxl101
The organization should set objectives and measures its effectiveness against
the objectives. While it might not give you a sense of the organization's
relative effectiveness (i.e., the objectives might be nigh impossible and
making any progress at all is a miracle), at least you have a general overall
sense of what they're _trying_ to accomplish and how effective they are at
solving those problems.

A data-driven and specific approach to projects will give people a chance to
ask questions like: is this problem worth solving? Is the UN the right
organization to solve this problem? Is this problem worth the cost we're
putting into the UN? Is the UN taking the right strategy? Etc.

If my government is funding the UN, I'd want a statement of what the UN is
attempting to do with that funding, and which parts of that my government
supports and thinks is valuable. I'd also want my government to conduct its
own assessment of whether the UN is effective (GAO style) and include that
analysis in its recommendation to me of whether to continue to fund them with
my tax money.

------
fredkbloggs
> "The first thing to understand: rules apply only to the powerless."

This has nothing to do with internships, the UN, or any particular office or
division. It's a universal truth. Yes, everyone who is considering an
internship should learn this if they haven't already, but not because it will
help them decide where to be an intern.

~~~
ljw1001
Learning that rule is one of the main benefits an internship provides for the
young.

------
mathattack
2 benefits of the UN in New York:

1 - They pay no tax. (And salaries get trued up to cover it)

2 - The kids get access to a great private school.

I don't know anyone who has done great work (besides avoiding wars) at the UN,
but I know a few who used the international non-profit experience as
launchpads to bigger and better things.

~~~
potatote
I also have a friend who works in the stats department in NYC. Back in 2011,
he was getting paid almost 90K salary (not including benefits like you
mentioned) and he told me that he loves his job because there's little or no
responsibility and is certainly not challenging. He's still at UN and I
haven't talked to him in the past couple of years. That and my personal
experience interning at NGOs have convinced me that these jobs actually are
quite chill and well-paid with little or no actual work (the hard work like
field trips are usually delegated to locals, who are paid significantly less
than the management, who are usually foreigners).

~~~
m_fayer
The hard work is basically optional. It's very difficult to get fired if you
do the bare minimum, and the organization is geared for about half it's staff
to not be productive. If you want to move up, you do work and take up the
slack. If you're comfortable where you are, you do the minimum, which is
very... minimal, and typically no one will stand in the way of either path.

------
moosey
I have never worked within the UN, but I have worked for companies small and
large, like many others here I am certain, and have seen the loss of quality
of purpose and people happen many times.

With a company, it is possible for a good leader to come in and start cleaning
up shop with either a buzz axe of a scalpel. Even at small companies, I have
seen places where a small subset of an organization get cancerous or hardened
by a bad director, and then when a new CEO comes in (often because an
investment firm takes over) that director is given the boot quite quickly.
Often this director is allowed to remain because the previous CEO is somehow
related or friends with that person, and once that pressure or corruption is
gone, then that director is no longer protected.

In the case of the UN, if I were to surmise, it is impossible to do so because
so many of the corruptions are external. It is possible that nobody is capable
of actually cleaning things up because one country or a group of countries
want to keep making sure that one of their friends live high on the hog at
taxpayer expense without doing anything valuable, hence the terrible personal
actions listed in the article. Dealing with these external corruptions are
basically impossible in a modern political climate in many nations, and of
course globally.

I don't have the connections, influence, intellectual capability, or any kind
of power to disrupt such massive forces. I wonder, does anyone? Is it possible
to disrupt such a thing without revolutionary action in a large number of
countries? With the internet, many things seem possible, but it seems that the
only way to make change happen is to go into meatspace. The internet seems to
delay that from happening in most instances (although it does seem to have the
effect of keeping the fire burning when they start).

This post is more of me speaking to my frustration than anything else.

------
brillenfux
> a very polluted interpersonal atmosphere

Or in other words: Politics.

~~~
meatysnapper
Or as Frank Zappa quipped, "The entertainment branch of the military
industrial complex"

~~~
gpvos
Apparently he said similar things but not exactly this quote. Still true
though.

------
mayyuen318
I am a donor of UN~ A bit hopeless after reading this~

Who can I donate to~ under such system and hierarchy, I guess lots of large
NGOs are messy internally.

~~~
cgag
GiveWell is a charity that evaluates other charities to try to find which do
the most good per dollar: [http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-
charities](http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities)

~~~
ljw1001
+1 for GiveWell. They rock.

------
m_fayer
The article, dismayingly, matches up with my own experience.

I was at the IAEA for 3 years, the first year as an intern and then two more
as regular staff, coding tools for weapons inspectors. The organization is
hardly irrelevant, so one would expect it to be better than some of the
smaller and more obscure organizations like in the article.

In some ways, it was better, but not in many. The IAEA interns were paid,
though not by the IAEA itself but by sponsoring countries. I was friends with
interns from other organizations who, much as the article reports, were
frequently unpaid, idle, disinterested, there for too short a time to do
serious work anyway, and mostly interested in networking and partying.

Some further responses:

"The first one is to pay the salaries and the perks of its employees." Oh yes.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention that the salaries are tax free
(international civil servants are tax exempt). They're explicitly tuned to be
"average for the position in the given field", but then they're not taxed, so
you're automatically making 30-40% above average for your field. Furthermore,
regular benefits like health insurance and retirement are extremely generous,
and are topped up by all sorts of perks such as rent-assistance, grants for
cars, daycare, and higher education, generous allowances for all sorts of
things such as paid home leave and subsidized moving. Many of the employees
were explicitly there until retirement because they knew of no other place to
get such generous treatment with so little demanded in return. Because if you
had a permanent contract, then oh yes there was quite little demanded in
return, firings were unheard of and a good number of staff spent half the days
chatting on the phone or drinking coffee in one of the many cafes.

"Fixed term contracts are the holy grail" Yes oh yes. Most of the younger
people were on short-term contracts, which lasted a year. It was understood
that if you pay your dues to the powers that be, your contract would be
extended over and over, with a significant pay-bump each time, until you got a
permanent one. The machinery of contract extension was inscrutable. You would
hear nothing back and typically your contract would be renewed on the day your
last one expired. Sometimes they'd blow it by a few days and people would end
up sitting around at home waiting to hear if they were really jobless or not.
Rock the boat a bit, and that renewal would be much less certain. The
ambitious and engaged minority tended to get fed up with this after a few
years, leaving only those who desperately desperately wanted the cushy perks-
for-life hanging on for those fixed term contracts.

Finally "rules apply only to the powerless" Yes oh yes. The whole organization
was hidebound and rules-driven, except when miraculously, it wasn't. Over and
over, the stonewalling would stop, the doors would open, and the structure
would rearrange itself in order to accommodate someone. You never knew why it
happened, and it was never discussed.

Overrall, I have to say that the experience was disillusioning, I believed
(and still do) in the mission and importance of the IAEA and the non-
proliferation treaty. It was hard to accept the degree to which the
organization had become the plaything of the entitled and the powerful.

------
thebiglebrewski
I get pretty sick of seeing organizations like this...and a lot of
slacktivism...and nothing being done about it.

What can we actually do about problems like this?!

------
exelius
This kind of supports my view of the UN being a place where countries can go
to denounce each other and appease the masses without actually having to go to
war.

The work they do is often irrelevant, but someone like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can
go in front of some TV cameras at the UN general assembly in New York and
denounce Israel. This lets him appear tough and influential in front of his
power base, yet without much risk of starting an actual international
conflict.

Without an outlet where countries can express such dissatisfaction, they would
take to launching missiles at each other with greater frequency. The UN's
existence is largely symbolic (organizations like NATO provide the real
firepower), but symbolism and politics go hand in hand. So rather than
lamenting the fact that the UN has no power and is a bureaucracy for its own
sake, I would say that was the entire purpose. If you make people do a bunch
of paperwork before they start fighting, chances are they will be satisfied
with registering a complaint against each other.

~~~
Frondo
Yeah, hah! You know what that tells me? _The system works._

People complaining instead of lobbing missiles? I wish everything could be
solved with so little bloodshed!

~~~
eternalban
> People complaining instead of lobbing missiles?

Well, technically speaking, US, UK have shown that some of the member states
get to "[lob] missiles" while others "complain".

You are right. The "system" works .. for the Anglo-Saxon Imperial Axis.

------
mangeletti
I think the URL needs to be updated to reflect the actual blog post, rather
than the blog's homepage; otherwise, it will be invalid after the next post is
made.

Current URL:

    
    
        https://desertqueensarah.wordpress.com
    

Correct URL:

    
    
        https://desertqueensarah.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/dont-be-a-un-intern/

~~~
dang
Thanks, we'll fix it.

------
untog
I'm going to be that really annoying person that leaves some feedback entirely
unrelated to the actual content, I'm sorry. I'll just do this the once and
hopefully we won't end up having a 20 comment long thread about it.

The two column layout on your blog makes it very difficult to read. You'd be
much better off having one column - like it does in smaller window sizes.

~~~
nickff
if you narrow your browser window, it automatically switches to one column.

~~~
Pyxl101
That doesn't help much for folks who read with their browser window maximized.
It's good to know, and thank you for pointing it out, but the original
feedback is pertinent - it's inconvenient to resize the browser for one page
that's flowed poorly.

A single column of similar size would be fine. Two columns is not great.

~~~
asgard1024
> That doesn't help much for folks who read with their browser window
> maximized.

They should install proper window manager, then. (I use GridMove.) I for
example use only half of the screen for the browser and sometimes it's
annoying, because the content is exactly couple letters too wide. Why should
web designers force their width of screen on everybody?

------
swehner
Just a silly rant against the UN. There's many of those.

~~~
akie
I've been working as a consultant for the UN for a while now, and most of what
she writes is spot on (unfortunately).

