image from jscoopmedia.com / Alyssa Wells

“So let me get this straight,” my dad said. I could imagine him cocking his head to the left and raising an eyebrow as if I were sitting in my old seat at our big kitchen table. Whenever I used to make some of my more incredible requests over dinner, he would lean forward in his chair, turn his head towards me and hold his hands in front of him as he prepared to reply. It was like he was trying to physically grasp my demands – as if they were tangible objects that he could point to and ask, “Are you kidding me?”

“You would work in New York.”

“Yes,” I said, already exasperated by the direction I knew the conversation would take. For my dad, a life-long Californian that already had a hard enough time with me moving to Chicago for college, a move to New York just meant I was truly never coming back to the west (or, as he constantly reminded me, “best”) coast.

“And you work there, every day, for however long you’re needed.” He measured out his words carefully, waiting for me to lose my temper.

“That’s right.”

“And they pay you…”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing, Daddy.”

It didn’t matter how many times we had this conversation or how close I thought I came to convincing him that this was normal for the industry. Journalism internships, often enough, are completely unpaid. At some point in history, I guess the publishing companies got together and decided that if they made getting an internship competitive enough, desperate students like me would do anything that’s legal, moral, and ethically sound to get one. (Even if that meant living off of Cup o’ Noodles and Cheerios in a fifth floor Queens walk-up for three months out of the year.) But this was New York, I assured him. NEW YORK. The place to be if I wanted to get any closer to the type of career I had been outlining in my meticulously organized life plan since I was 16. So he agreed.

The move to New York was smooth enough. In an attempt to save some cash, I found a one-bedroom apartment in a nice part of Queens to sublet for the summer. (Mind you, I did not live alone – I sublet with a friend suffering from similarly overwhelming college debt.) We considered living in Manhattan for the .0235 seconds that it took for the Manhattan sublet page to load on Craigslist.

Living in Manhattan on a tight budget is not a good idea if you intend to do the following things:

1. Eat, anything. Our little nook of Queens was only twenty minutes from work, including walking, and boasted some of the best ethnic food I’ve ever tasted. I’m a bit of a cuisine snob, but the chicken tikka masala and rosemary naan in the Greek neighborhood of Astoria far surpassed any other Indian fine dining I’ve encountered. And the best part was, I actually had the money to go out and eat every once in awhile rather than scraping the funds together to buy a $15 sandwich in SoHo.

2. Reside somewhere larger than a closet or crawlspace. I had another internship lined up for the fall as soon as my summer gig (and my summer sublet) ended and I was tempted by the allure of living in Manhattan. Since I was already in New York, it was easy for me to check out a few places and I didn’t see the harm in a little window shopping.

When I stepped into a one-bedroom in the East Village, I remember being pleasantly surprised. The space was quaint but definitely livable. A retro kitchenette took up a wall of the modest living space, and the small bedroom was just to the left. I sat down on the futon sofa to get a feel for the place and found myself staring at a door where I would normally expect a television. “Is that a closet?” I asked greedily. I had only been in New York a short while but I knew that in Manhattan currency an extra closet was worth its stackable storage space in gold.

“No, that’s the shower,” the owner said with a snort, as if having a shower behind a completely normal looking door in your kitchen/living room was—I don’t know—normal. I reached out from where I was sitting against the wall and opened the door. Sure enough, a shower nozzle and plastic curtain stared back. My first thought was, “I don’t want a shower in my kitchen,” and my second thought was, “I don’t want to be able to open my shower door from a sitting position on my couch.” And then I moved back to Queens.

3. Go out, ever. Sixteen dollar martinis and $8 beers. I don’t feel the need to go on.

When I tell some people I live in Queens they look at me with wide-eyed wonderment. “I’m a journalism intern,” I tell them and their eyes shrink down to normal size with thoughtful understanding.

“Are you just like that Devil Wear’s Prada girl?” they then ask. And I just smile.

Have you ever had an unpaid internship? What did you do to save some extra cash?