[unidentified103]

Yeah, I can see how such an e-mail wouldn't exactly feel so welcoming if your participation was assumed and suddenly thrust upon you. But I don't necessarily think that it makes sense to believe that they wrote the e-mail that way because they thought you were helpless. Whoever wrote it could have been excited about the program and assumed everyone else would be too.

[meej]

Well I'm paraphrasing and omitting details for reasons of brevity and memory (this was almost 20 years ago, after all). I do recall the email was lengthy and made the point more than once that I needed extra support because I was a woman. I was at least halfway through my internship, which had been going very well, when I got it. It wasn't my first intern-like role, either, I'd done an 8-month co-op at another company the year before, which also went very well. The word that Maria used in her post, and that I quoted above, really does match how I felt -- I felt like I was being told I was a victim when that didn't mesh at all with my experience.