How to report on an academically required internship with a bad supervisor relationship

Question

I am a few days from completion of an industrial internship that is required for my Masters degree. I have had a bad experience with the supervisor of this internship, who has insulted me several times during my internship period. He is mean, he gets angry very easily, he is bad-tempered and most importantly he is ignorant: he never knew what I must do as a trainee, it is me who proposes the tasks to him. Finally, now that I have finished the main task of my internship, he says it is useless.

Completing the internship and the degree involves reporting on my internship to an academic jury. Given this bad experience, how should I handle my report?

In particular:

1. I do not want to give an acknowledgement to my field supervisor in my report: is this a bad thing to do? I mean, will the jury ask me why I did not write an acknowledgement?
2. If the jury asks about my evaluation of the company where I did the internship, should I be honest in telling them what happened, or should I lie and tell them everything was fine?

Answer 1

If the jury asks about my appreciation of the company where I did the internship: should I be honest in telling them what happened and that my advisor is too incompetent? Or should I lie and tell them everything was fine?

You should do the same as in any other case when a professional relationship goes wrong. You need to:

1. Focus on the facts. "The project was not going smoothly" is a fact. "We had communication issues, so I ended up delivering not what they wanted" is also ok. "The project was going badly because the advisor is incompetent" is you trying to assign blame. Stay clear of that. You do not need to lie to the committee and pretend that all was great, but try to refrain from presenting your own interpretation of the events. It is understandable that you will want to make sure that the committee understands that the issues were due to no fault of yours, but by badmouthing your advisor (no matter how warranted) you are likely to reach the opposite.
2. Take the high road. If it is customary that students write an acknowledgement to their advisors, write a short, polite acknowledgement thanking him to allow you to work in his team, if you can thank him for nothing else. Rocking the boat over something so minor seems unwise.
3. Whatever you do, stay professional. Acting out of anger and a lust to "get back" on your advisor for his insults will backfire on you.

Important Edit:

Based on your follow-up information:

(retracted - some racist comments as well as statements about unduly long work hours)

The fourth, maybe even more important point is:

If something really bad went on (like in your case), find out what the correct official action to take is. File an official complaint with your university, or even talk to a lawyer and have him look into filing a law suite (racist comments in the workspace are certainly grounds for a civil law suite where I live). Don't take a placebo action that does not hurt and does not help, such as not including him in your acknowledgements.

The other 3 points stay in place - even if something terrible went down, you need to stay professional and you need to focus on the facts, in your official reports as much as when you talk to your jury about the incident(s).

Answer 2

1. Be a better person than him. Write the acknowledgement.
2. I would think that telling your jury that he was a very hard man to work for is fine, but I wouldn't call him incompetent to people who are effectively his peers. I definitely wouldn't recommend him other students.

Answer 3

Even if writing an acknowledgement is the norm in such a kind of report, acknowledgements remain a kind of gesture, which should have no impact on a professional evaluation. If such gestures have to be performed for their own sake, they become pointless and worthless¹: If literally everybody is being acknowledged, being acknowledged isn’t worth anything. Thus for acknowledgement having any point, there must be at least a small chance of, e.g., an advisor not being acknowledged, if this person really does not deserve it.

So, if your advisor did everything to be not worthy of any acknowledgement (as it sounds like), the only reason to acknowledge him would be that he still has impact on your grade or career². Assuming that this isn’t the case, the jury should not ask you about this missing acknowledgement, as your relationship to your supervisor should (idealistically) not play into your evaluation. (I will come back to this in a moment.)

As for your defense (or interview with the jury), I second the already given advice: Avoid appearing to place blame on your supervisor, but focus on the facts instead. Depending on what the mode of the defense is, e.g., if you are mainly asked questions and do not have to freely report on big chunks, you might not even need to address the issues yourself, unless asked. If you are however asked, e.g., why you made some decision on your project and it was due to your advisor commanding this decision, clearly say so. This also applies to the acknowledgement: If you are asked why you did not include one, it is the jury who brings up this topic and not you, and you can thruthfully say that you felt that there was nothing to acknowledge – but never bring on this topic on your own.

Another thing that you should be prepared for: If your internship was sufficiently long, the jury might hold the opinion that it was your responsibility to report severe problems to the university, such that it could assign you a new internship position or similar. Whether this opinion is justified depends on several factors, such as how much time this would have wasted and how high the risk would have been that such a complaint would have backfired at you and so on.

Also, if it’s not too late for this: Talk to your student body. They better know your specific situation than we do and might have experience with similar cases. Also, they have the means to drastically reduce the chances that this company ever gets an intern from your university again (I assume that they keep a list of good and bad companies for such internships).

Finally, talk to the jury (or another appropriate person), after everything is over. They also will have means to drastically reduce the chances that this company ever gets an intern from your university again.

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^{¹ And you might enter some euphemism treadmill which ends up in a special acknowledgement language which has nothing to do with actual language anymore, as it is the case for employment reference letters in my country.
² Be aware that there might be not-so-obvious ties between your advisor and members of your university.}