Hi there

For context, I live in Massachusetts and worked an unpaid internship for college credit (towards my graduation)

Back in January, I started my internship at a film production company, specializing in post-prod video editing. Some of my duties included writing proposals, treatments, talking to clients, writing invoices, and mainly editing corporate commercials.

So to lay down the situation; there were 3 interns working there, including myself. One of the other kids is someone I know that is a part of the same program at my school. The third intern is another college student from another school. There are two managers; one of them works remotely from home (due to covid I think, I never really bothered asking) and the other manager worked with us in the office, supervising our work. A kid that was an intern last year now works there full time as an employee, but he's also underpaid, allegedly.

All in all, there's only 6 of us in the company, if you're including the 3 interns.

My manager in the office, let's call him J, has some sort of personality disorder. Some days, he'd be very chill and easy-going, actually fun to talk to. Other days, he'd come in, berate our work, insult our efforts, and swear and rant about things. I also have a strong hunch that he has a drinking problem. Bottles of liquor sit in the office and sometimes I'd see stacks of IPA's in his workspace. Not related, but thought worth mentioning to better picture the situation.

The reason why I'm writing this; the most recent commercial I've had to edit and produce, was a 6 minute advertisement for a company's webpage. Since I've had direct contact with the clients and literally wrote the invoice, the company I work for would be compensated 10,000 dollars for our efforts. The catch is; I've had to work on almost every single element of the project, unpaid.

I had my breaking point Tuesday when my boss was snapping at me for doing a "bad" job on the project, and this has been a constant issue. Day after day, he has berated and insulted my efforts on this commercial, even though we've sent out rough cuts to the clients and they've given us feedback saying they "absolutely love" what we've done. During his ranting, I walked out of the office, and never came back. I worked out a plan with my school advisor to still receive credit for the internship, 2 weeks shy of completing. It was starting to deteriorate my mental health greatly. My internship is supposed to be 14 weeks. I made it to week 12.

Now I understand that compensation in the form of college credit makes the actual program legal. But is it legal that I was the sole editor of a 10 grand project that I wouldn't receive any money for, but my managers would? I was under the impression that interns are only allowed to provide efforts dedicated towards something with the intent of "training and teaching" or non-profit. Is it fair that I spent weeks on a high-budget advertisement that I wouldn't get money for?

For more context, I also had to take a train into the city for nearly 8 weeks until I realized it was taking up 10 hours every day. For the last 4 weeks, I would take my car in, which was faster, but it would add up to about 100 dollars every week. So yeah, I lost a lot of money (in addition to paying tuition for this experience) just to get treated like shit and work for free.

TLDR; 12 weeks at my internship consisted of making corporate advertisements that were for profit, but I wasn't compensated for any of my efforts, with the exception of college credit. My boss has mood swings and would treat me like dirt sometimes, and expect me to know everything about what I was doing even though I was there to learn.