So here I sit, alone in my one-bedroom apartment, listening to a depressing mix of Pearl Jam bootlegs and contemplating different methods to keep my mind off the fact that I’m two hours away from where I really want to be, with everyone I love.

To top it off, my Internet connection doesn’t work, my air conditioning is broken, my toilet runs and there seems to be a stagnant funk lurking in the kitchen.

Ah, the trials and tribulations of a college student during her first week at an internship. Not that the incredible experience of it all isn’t welcome. There’s no doubt my 12 weeks of picking up mug shots from the drivers license bureau and calling county medical examiners to determine causes of death will improve my journalistic skills.

My problem simply is that I’ve lived in Ames as long as I can remember. I’ve always been within two miles of my parents. And I’ve never before had to pay anything that even resembles a bill. Suddenly, I’m on my own with no human to turn to.

Sure, I can call my fianc‚, my parents and my best friends (actually I can’t because I don’t have long-distance service), but there are no warm bodies to hug me when I’m lonely or smile at me when I’m sad.

I’ve finally realized how lucky I am to have so many people who care about me nearby at all times.

Most people I know would call me spoiled — especially my sister.

Aside from working at the Daily, being an intern for the Cedar Rapids Gazette is my first job with a real paycheck. I had a car when I turned 16 (a really cool one, I might add), my parents pay whatever tuition isn’t covered by scholarship and I learned how to do laundry the day before I moved to Cedar Rapids.

I also don’t have to worry about the fact that journalists get paid less than teen-agers selling popcorn at Movies 12.

My fianc‚, best known as Coco, is majoring in computer engineering and already has a job at Engineering Animation.

But the common misconception about kids who are spoiled is that they don’t appreciate what they receive. Some may argue I take things for granted, but after this summer, I’ll do so no more.

Perhaps the most important lesson of an internship isn’t how na‹ve a reporter a person is and how much he has left to learn, but how scary the real world is and how much he should embrace the innocence he has left.

One of my most educational experiences so far has been checking up on a source simply because he was black and came from a certain neighborhood in the city. It’s not a racist thing, a senior reporter explained to me, merely a necessary caution with people from that particular area.

So the reporter contacted for me the city’s parks commissioner, who knows most of the people from the ‘hood and can tell whether they are good or bad, legit or fraudulent.

When that person didn’t know the source’s name, I got to check even deeper into his background. From a brochure the man gave me, I learned he was from a small city in Texas. I looked up the area code, called information, contacted the apartment complex he supposedly saved from depravity and found out that the people who knew him saw him as a savior.

This man, who was organizing a youth gathering in downtown Marion to send recorded songs and signed cards to kids in Littleton, Colo., had turned the most troubled, drug-ridden and diseased area of that Texas town into a clean, God-fearing community.

And because he wanted to do the same thing in C.R., we were suspicious he might be trying to get some devious personal benefit out of it — side from the fact that he is a reverend and gets enjoyment from the sheer act of spreading the gospel word to kids whose lives have potential to go awry.

I also had the chore of trying to contact a list of “deadbeat dads” who had not paid child support and find out why. I hesitantly agreed, thinking to myself that, if the state government can’t find these guys and have to put them on a wanted poster, then how am I, a measly intern for the state’s second- or third-largest newspaper, supposed to miraculously find them?

So after looking for their names in the phone book, conducting an Internet search and calling area code information, I was able to convince the editor that these men were either unlisted or already had skipped the country.

Maybe I’m just realizing how small Ames really is, but it seems to me newspapers in bigger cities either have unrealistic expectations or the editors are sitting in the corner, laughing at the intern trying to call one of Iowa’s most wanted to ask what he did to get his mug plastered on the walls of every police station in the state.

Then again, I still have 11 weeks left of my internship, and I may decide the most valuable lessons learned were what I was supposed to learn. But until my time here is over and I can make an educated judgment of the importance of my job experience, I will stand by my assertion that internships aren’t intended for learning about their job fields — they’re for learning about life.

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Carrie Tett is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ames.