Some internships were monotonous and awful, go-for jobs masquerading as a learning experience so that the employer could basically get an indentured servant and appear to be a pillar of the community by welcoming college students for their practicums with open arms.
Stark Industries had started out that way, too, and Lydia had been sorely disappointed by the fact that her "hands-on" experience had turned out to be a whole lot of "Mr. Stark is asking for more wire, if you could please go get a spool from..." Well. Lydia learned to tune it all out. She sucked it up because, whether or not this internship was a dud, there was no denying that putting Stark Industries on her resume, even as an unpaid internship for one semester, was going to look incredible.
Everything was going annoyingly bad, if you asked her, for the first few weeks and then, unintentionally, she'd changed her level of importance in the company in the span of a lunch break. Lydia had forgone lunch in favor of observing in one of the labs that afternoon and she had really meant to keep her big mouth shut, but while she watched the projected displays of chemical equations and heard JARVIS prattling back and forth with one of the scientists, it had slipped.
"That's never going to work. You can't expect that sort of reaction from those components. You're not going to get the desired kinetic energy from that, you're just going to get a burst of forward motion from the initial reaction and then it's going to drop. It won't have the right force of attraction to...create...momentum...never mind."
She hadn't realized that she could be heard when she was criticizing from the seats behind the glass of the amphitheater where the lab was nestled, but suddenly, all of the scientists had stopped and were looking at her. Oh God...
Someone had scoffed. Someone had laughed. Someone had mockingly asked for the pretty little princess's input, and that last one had made her angry. Lydia had gotten to her feet and gestured for them to try it; to move forward with the experiment and then, when it inevitably failed, she would show them how to do it properly. The experiment was put into action and Lydia was right.
Then she corrected their equation over the loudspeaker and invited them to try it again. It worked.
She'd been content to be smug as hell as she started toward the exits to move back out of the observatory to go back to work, as her lunch break ended, when JARVIS had stopped her, telling her that Mr. Stark had wanted to speak with her. Lydia's face had paled immediately and she croaked out a "thanks, JARVIS..." before she'd made her way to the conference room she'd been told to wait in. Oh God, she was going to lose her job for making his 'greatest minds in the world' scientists look stupid in front of a fourth year college student who happened to be only eighteen years old and carrying her things in a Coach bag.