Phone Surveys, SATs, and Condoms

The summer I spent cold-calling Birthright Israel alumni, teaching SAT prep, and interning for Planned Parenthood.

When I took the last final exam of my sophomore year of college, I had nothing lined up for the summer. As a student at a prestigious-ish liberal arts school in Waltham, Massachusetts, the expectation was that we would Build Our Resumes during the summer. But I had no internship and no job—just plenty of rejections. Still, before I left town to visit my parents, I signed a sublease in Boston for June, July, and August. I was nineteen, going on twenty, and determined to never live in my parents’ house again.

By the time I moved into my sublease a few weeks later, I had one part-time job that would cover rent but not much else. A week later, I had a second tentative job, and a part-time unpaid internship, and suddenly I was juggling an unexpectedly busy and strange schedule.

On weekday evenings and the occasional Sunday afternoon, I would pick up shifts at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies. They were doing a massive research project, and I was paid $12 an hour to call Birthright Israel alumni and applicants and ask them question after question about their current connections to Judaism. Very few people want to spend 20 minutes on the phone talking about their Judaism. Not even when I offered them a $25 Amazon gift card.

Job #2 started with four weekends of training. The Princeton Review didn’t let just anyone teach their SAT classes — in fact, nearly half of my classmates failed out of training. That wasn’t an option for me: I needed the $18 an hour too badly. By July, I was spending weekday mornings driving out to far-flung Boston suburbs to teach bored sixteen-year-olds how to beat a standardized test. SAT prep is just about the last thing that a teenager wants to do at 9am in summer, which meant that my students were maybe even less interested in what I had to say than the people I called for the research study.

But everyone wanted to talk to me during my internship, because I also spent that summer doing street sex education for Planned Parenthood. Armed with piles of free condoms and lube, pamphlets galore, a “let’s talk about sexual health” t-shirt, and the keys to a bright pink Scion branded with the same, my teammates and I covered the streets of Boston and Cambridge. In Copley Square during evening rush hour, I spent twenty minutes comparing hormonal birth control options with a commuter. At lunchtime in Harvard Square, my friend and I taught a trio of teenage boys why lube wasn’t just for gay people, complete with a very strong warning about flavored lube and vaginas. When we drove the car around town blasting Spice Girls, everyone waved at us.

Obviously my unpaid internship was the best of the bunch — and the only one that remains vaguely relevant to my career as a semi-professional feminist. Feminist non-profits love to hear about my summer handing out safer sex supplies for Planned Parenthood. I kept the SAT prep job for another two and a half years, and it kept paying my rent when I graduated from college without a job. And my name shows up in the thank you section in that Cohen Center research study, which may turn out to be the only academic publication I’m ever named in!

But in the end, all three gigs taught me the same thing: how to talk to people. People who didn’t want to talk to me. People who were bored. Random people on the street. I learned how to start a conversation, how to keep people engaged, how to stand up in front of a room without shaking too much. It turns out that I’m actually pretty good at it. Somehow, my totally unplanned summer turned into one of the most useful skill-building summers of my life, and there was nothing prestigious or resume-enhancing about it.

This article is part of our ‘Summer Series’ collection. Read more stories here.

Rachel Goldfarb is a writer, editor, digital strategist, and activist in New York City. She’ll still happily chat with you about your birth control options. Follow her on Twitter @RachelG8489.

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