Disgustingly Bad

I feel the program was misrepresented.

The Intern Group says the following about accomodation:
"We offer private bedrooms in shared apartments.
All of the student apartments are located near to one another. The apartments are excellently located 25 minutes from Central London and are the ideal base for exploring London during your stay.
We provide private bedrooms in family home-stays. Living with a London family is the perfect option if you wish to perfect your English and immediately be immersed in London life and culture."

The way they were organized, they didn't get me any housing options until the day before I got to London, and they only gave me one option, a "family" homestay an hour away from central London, and nowhere near the other students. I had never said that I wanted the family homestay option but it was the only one given me, 7 hours before I was to board the plane. The "family" was a single man in his 50s. What if I had said no? Where would they have put me?

The accommodation was indeed an issue, as I had read the detailed explanations on the Intern Group’s website about how and where I would live. I expected to live near the center of London to have “a base for exploring London” but, most importantly I expected roommates, as I had not chosen preemptively a family homestay, but that was the only option I was given, and it was given a day before I arrived. I am a person who needs people around me, friends my age or near it. I didn’t get that, and what I did get was unacceptable.

Furthermore, the house I was put in smelled so obviously of smoke, and the second hand tobacco and even marijuana smoke crept up to my top room continuously throughout the day, making me sick within 30 hours. I told an Intern Group supervisor the day I arrived at the first activity (30 minutes late because it took me an hour to get to the Canada Water station) that better housing would be much needed, due to the smoke, the poor quality of the house, and the distance from my peers.

To give you a better idea of the distance I was from central London, from my peers, and how far my job was, the Intern Group says the following on their website, " [They pay for] all your public transportation in London valid in the zones of your accommodation and workplace (typically in zones 1 and 2). We provide you with your public transportation for the first month." They say typically within zones 1 and 2, yet my work was in zone 6, and where I lived was in zone 4. They didn't pay for trains to those places, and I was out of money on my subway card before even arriving at my internship the first day.

Back to the accommodation.
On my second day in the house, I was offered a cigarette while sitting on the steps.

To avoid becoming sicker I moved to a hostel at my expense, where I knew it would be loud, but at least not so smoky. This 2-star backpacker hostel was a big step up over the home share.

I pestered the intern group for 4 days before they could give me an answer about what was going on with my housing. 4 days by myself, in a foreign country, spending 5+ hours on transport each day and only eating a meal a day due to the loss of appetite from the smoke and then cough and cold medicine.

I got to my internship on Wednesday and was a bit happier, seeing that I might have some friends here. I did my best, with the nasty cold I had gotten from the sore throat and cough from inhaling smoke for 2 days. I quickly realized that this company felt as though they didn’t really need an intern but just kind of like acce[ted an intern that was forced upon them, and they would take 6 weeks of free labor. The Intern Group had this statement on their website, "Partnering with a range of first-class companies and NGOs, our program offers comprehensive personal and professional development. We offer internships in London across all career fields." But the company I was with obviously didn’t have a strict program set up, and they were in Ruislip, which is about an hour and 20 minutes away from the center of London. Not to mention they only had 6 employees. How is a 6 employee company first-class? I could tell soon that I wasn’t going to learn anything in my field from the internship, as they were just asking me to do things that I already knew and was talented at. I was going to give it a chance, but when I walked out the first day, I sat on the stairs for a moment, to find my way back on the map while I still had WiFi, and suddenly I heard all the employees begin to gossip about me, asking why was I there an how I was kind of dumb for working for free. It sucked all the little spirit I had left out of me. So I decided to withdraw. I stayed again at the hostel and went back the next day to say goodbye, because I wanted to be polite.

Again, to push how strongly The Intern Group's lack of organization was, I did everything I needed to do on time for the applications, and got my visa three days before my program started. That means I only had 3 days to buy plane tickets and of course the price of those tickets was much higher than if purchased earlier. I ended up needing priority visa processing which cost about 300 dollars, luckily for me, I asked them to pay for it. When I asked a fellow student in the program about their visa, they told me they had received their visa just days before as well, and the Intern Group had told them to pay the 300 dollar fee themselves. That's disgusting to me.

All those things together opened my eyes to how this was going to be a waste of time. It felt very poorly organized, it felt like no one was paying attention to my situation until I said I wanted to withdraw, and it didn’t match the descriptions and everything I had read online.