Coincidental that interns aspire to excell and despise Excel? I think not.

If you have ever opened your email to see a strangely targeted mass mailing, inviting you to “check out a new website by ACME company” or “attend an event sponsored by ACME company” and “oooh, would you mind terribly putting up this itty-bitty banner ad?” You can thank an intern.

Coming up with thousands of names for the all important “Points of Contact” Excel spreadsheet is a staple of the intern experience. It doesn’t matter if you are interning in Congress or Cinemax: Excel will rule your life. Sure, bragging can be done about the “awesome committee meeting you sat in on” (note: the importance of the meeting is in direct proportion to the level of staff attending. E.g.: super important people attend super important meetings. Stupid/pointless meetings are attended by the interns. Who will crowd the meeting because they were “important enough to be handed the awesome responsibility of trying to stay awake while someone discusses the finer points of krill regulation”) or “the famous director’s second assistant that you spotted in the halls of your place of work” or even “that crazy person that you had to deal with over the phone/bully away from the front desk.” But it all comes down to the Excel spreadsheet.

Excel, is in fact, the most horrible Microsoft application to ever be invented. It is also, one of the most useful. Excel spreadsheets lack any intuitive functions. Oh, you want to add up all the numbers from this column? Well, either highlight the column—top to bottom! TOP to BOTTOM dammit!—and then press the strange sigma sign up here. Or perhaps enter the super easy formula consisting of quotations marks, ampersands, and squiggly marks. With excessive Excel expericene, this can possibly become second-nature. That is also a large portion of your brain that will never recover.

However, like the internship itself, “Proficient in Excel” looks quite impressive on a resume. Which is why we do it.