Internships: they can be the bane of a college student's existence.

You hear all the horror stories from friends: You work 50 hours a week, earn no money yet have to pay hundreds of dollars to get college credit; a sleazy authority figure hits on you; your job description could best be described as "coffee pourer."

But then there are the good ones -- where you're treated less like a stupid teenager and more like an adult, where you scrape together enough money for rent or, in the best-case scenario, where you land a full-time job after graduation.

There's no surefire way of getting a solid internship. Take my experience in England last semester, which set me up with two separate weeklong internships, each of which couldn't have been more different.

The first one was phenomenal -- it was at the Manchester office of The Guardian, one of England's national dailies. Over a free lunch at a posh bistro on my first day, three journalists picked my brain about politics and my favorite books. I got to talk about the death penalty with the prisons reporter, a brand-new journalist at age 60 who had bounced in and out of prison for 15-odd years. I even provided tech support, showing him how to use copy-and-paste on the computers.

Having levelheaded, adult-to-adult conversations with these reporters would have been enough, but they turned me loose with a story assignment that wasn't a futile exercise but what became a published story.

I even got to observe the preliminary hearing of an American ex-Marine who had met a 12-year-old English girl over the Internet and had taken her to mainland Europe. Being the seemingly only other American in the courtroom made for uncomfortable conversation with other people in the observation area:

"Wait, your accent ... Are you related to the defendant?" Hasty explanations ensued.

On what was probably my most memorable birthday ever, I met a billionaire grocery tycoon and got a tour of greater West Yorkshire (including the best fish and chips I had all semester). I came home grinning every day, and I even got a letter of recommendation from the northern editor.

I had high hopes going into my second internship -- this one in London, at the main office of a newspaper that will remain unnamed. On my first day, I walked past London Bridge, all the while pretending I'd be America's answer to Bridget Jones.

I was snapped out of my fantasy world when my first task was to make copies of clips for the entertainment reporter who referred to me as "work experience girl." I wanted to ask her what it was like to interview Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman at Cannes, but I was afraid she'd give me more dusty catalogs to throw out.

I ended up with a boss with a snooty name like Nicola or Imelda, who was content to let me sit in the corner all week, reading old issues of the arts/entertainment magazines. One time she even asked me, "Oh, you're still here?"

I made my presence known to everyone in the office, offering help with anything. One reporter gave me a digital camera and asked me to interview people on the street about their favorite bars, new movies or fashion for sound bites for one of the magazines the paper produced.

So I got to wait outside a theater in Leicester Square, asking moviegoers about The Passion of the Christ along with religious fanatics who chased people with pamphlets.

People told me to "sod off" quite a few times, but the job wasn't all bad. I was just plain experiencing London while on the job, and I couldn't have asked for more than that.

This brings me to my point -- I have no words of wisdom about getting a good internship. Nada. They're the luck of the draw.

No matter how hard you try to land that coveted internship, there's no way to be sure it won't be the worst experience of your life.

But, there is a consolation -- if it does end up being really bad, that's the situation in which you need to be bold -- be an adult, really -- and ask for more responsibility.

It's good practice for standing up to authority, which will no doubt happen in your full-time job.

In the pre-real world, you can't do much more than make the best of your situation.