You know, mw, those are valuable lessons, and there are much older people, well into their careers, who are still shooting themselves in the foot at each new job because they never learned them. You'll do ok.

I got arrogant because I had been successful and applauded in grad school, and I had done pretty well with the other museums I've been working with. I didn't come in with the attitude of "I'm starting completely over here so  I need to prove myself" but "I've proven myself and you guys are thrilled to have me." It was a humiliating experience to learn otherwise, but I'm getting past it.

I think the biggest hurt in all of this was learning that my supervisor did NOT think I had done a great job. I had really thought we were bonded over all the conversations we had about our lives. She had just lost a friend and I am still dealing with the loss of my own back in November, and we'd talk about our families and the issues we were having with them. She brought a LOT of her personal issues into the workplace, and that was pretty inappropriate on her part.

I really did see/think of her as a friend. And then on reflection, I realized that  should not have happened at all. She was there to be my boss, not my buddy, and lines got blurred that shouldn't have been. It's nice for them to be friendly, but she also needed to be direct and honest about what I was lacking in my work. I've had supervisors sit me down and say, "Alright, this is something you need to do to be better at your job", and I took what they did and I like to think I got better. Complaining to the director about your intern while being nice to said intern's face does not get better results. I needed her to tell me directly what I could do better, not for us to have conversations about her friends who got arrested during Senior Week at Ocean City or about her road-trip plans for the fall.

Hearing what you have said reminded me of my first internship at a big 4 accounting firm. I did not get any hints of issues until the end from my supervisor. My issue was the opposite of your issue, I worked myself too hard and everyone around me was feeling like I was burning too much. i too suffer from arrogance: the arrogance of holding the world on my shoulders. I was working full time and taking on 21 credits or a 7 course class load. I did all that, because I needed to prove myself to others.

When they dismissed me and did not offer me a job afterward, I felt angry, betrayed, and ashamed in myself for failing after making so many sacrifices. I cried, drank in excess, and psychologically wanted to end all my struggle. In my darkest hour, I asked myself "should I just give up?" "Should I live off disability benefits and be another statistic along with the 60% of other unemployed legally 

blind people?" I found myself saying "no" to all of that, and I soldiered on with only a 0.25 decline in my final gpa of 3.46. I am an extreme case, but i just want you to know that there is more to life.

Yeah, it does sound as though the supervisor behaved inappropriately, and that's probably going to have been noticed also. Once a manager oversteps into too much closeness, it's hard to come back from that.  Some people want to please and be nice to everyone and it's hard for them to be negative, especially to someone perceived as a peer. She should at least have tried, though. It may well bite her in the butt again later.

I'm in a sometimes-similar position with my own manager right now. We both have dark senses of humor and we get too informal kind of suddenly. I deal with it by often addressing him as "Boss," to sort of remind him that we need to keep things professional.

I'm going to disagree completely with what most people have said about your supervisor.  It is possible in management to have genuine and fulfilling friendships with those people who report into you.  In that though, is a covenant that whatever happens in your friendship does not effect the office, and whatever happens in the office need not effect your friendship.

It is fine to share personal matters at work.  Vocalising them and receiving validation (or a more nuanced point of view) helps your mind work through events, and surprisingly ill keep you more focused on your job than you would otherwise have been.

I would suspect that your supervisor got on well with you, liked you personally, but couldn't get over the issues you mentioned in bullet points 1 and 2.  You didn't get sacked for oversharing.... points 1 & 2 were enough on their own.  Moreover, you mentioned in your last blog a "specific incident".

I say this because, through everything, the very best employees take full responsibility for themselves.  The first step to learning from something is to stop shifting blame from anywhere but yourself, to truly understand how YOU could have handled things better and to resolve to do so in future.

I myself learned the hard way, but that the best news is that people quickly forget, and it shouldn't hold you back.  I have been very lucky in my career so far... but it came from a very, VERY hard lesson.

West

I disagree Westie. 

A manager has a responsibility to provide timely, accurate, and documented feedback to an employee, precisely because they have power over that person's continued employment. It sounds like that didn't happen here. New managers do tend to have trouble with negative feedback, especially if they have become close to a report. 

One way in which method could do better in the future is to ask for assessments proactively, and ask specifically for ways in which he could improve his performance. That'd be taking responsibility for himself. Another way in which he can improve is to monitor the professionalism of his relationship with his manager so that it does not become intimate to such an extent that it interferes with proper business communication, and it sounds like he's doing so. 

Yes, Irritable. I had another internship- this one happened from mid-May to the end of June, and I just sent off an email from them and asked them for any constructive feedback. I haven't heard back from them yet, but I'll definitely make it a point to ask now.

I'm not trying to shift blame on anyone here. I got complacent, did not watch carefully over my actions, and I assumed I was doing well instead of actually doing well. I should have taken things more seriously, and I didn't. I'm living with the fact that I irreparably ruined any chance I had with that state agency, which happens to be involved with most of my field in the state of Delaware.

But at the same time, there are ways I could have been handled better, and there are things on their side that need to be done.

I think it just depends on the manager, some managers can handle a personal relationship with employees, whereas others have to keep that distance. It wouldn't have been because of your relationship that you lost the internship

I feel that i'm the first kind of manager, as at my old job I tried to keep things light (mainly because i managed a group of volunteers, rather than paid staff).

Nah, I'm not saying it was the main cause- the main cause was that I overstepped my bonds as a intern and made critical comments to other workers in the agency while they were doing their job, which was incredibly disruptive.

But I also think that there were bonds that my supervisor overstepped, and in retrospect we had far too many conversations that were not work-related which happened during work.