The best internship I ever had was before I switched my career path to computer science; it was an accounts internship at a small (~10 FTEs, ~10 freelancers) ad

The best internship I ever had was before I switched my career path to computer science; it was an accounts internship at a small (~10 FTEs, ~10 freelancers) advertising firm. It was unpaid besides a small meal & transportation stipend. The atmosphere was very similar to what you'd expect from a small tech firm: friendly, low-key atmosphere, lots of nicknames, lot of small fun free things. My mentor (I don't really know what his actual title was. I just called him Joel.) explained to me that there were two parts of what I was doing: 1. Fake work (his words, not mine.) He said that there would be downtime, and that I should spend it as productively as possible; if that meant taking on some grunt work for a neglecting client, good. If that meant browsing the internet, fine. It was my time, and he said he trusted me enough to assume that if I wanted to spend my summer on Reddit then I would have done so from my couch. 2. Real work. Joel explained that the difference between an intern and a junior employee was usually a piece of paper and a few months of experience and little else; as such, he explained that I'd be given a certain level of autonomy. I had mistakenly assumed this to mean "you can go to meetings and you can go down the street for coffee": what this meant was "you are expected to meet and converse with clients on your own." I fondly remember sitting across the table from a small bakery looking to open its third store, poring over market research and possible online advertising. That summer I was referred to as a 'social media guru', a term which I realize is sort of toxic but I was so proud of this place that had made me feel valuable. That summer I was given a taste of what the industry was like, not by attending flashy events or getting a bunch of branded apparel but by doing the work that someone would do. There's a lot of talk in the tech sphere about auto-didacticism, but what I learned in that internship could never be found in a book or on Coursera. (Ironically: one of the pieces of 'fake work' that I gobbled up was maintenance of a bunch of WordPress sites that needed maintenance. Instead of using the firm's usual web design guy, who charged $200/hr for basic HTML & CSS work that even I could do, I convinced one of the partners to just let me do it instead. I had so much fun I decided to take a few CS classes for kicks, and then somehow I ended up with a Computer Science major.)