For reasons that I assume relate directly to a large ad buy, CNN decided to let some hack from "CareerBuilder.com" answer the question that's on every young person's mind: "Why are internships so important?" Yes, please tell us, Ms. Beth Braccio Hering of CareerBuilder.com. Why are internships so important? God knows all my students are killing each other to get them. It's mildly horrifying to see the zeal with which they fight for the privilege of working for free, but let's stick to the original question.
You're a recent college graduate with a killer cover letter, a stellar grade point average and glowing recommendations.
But if one important item is missing from your résumé, good luck trying to get a position at The McTigue Financial Group in Chicago.
You need an internship.
(snip)
The good news for those fortunate enough to earn a spot: One in four become a full-time financial representative after graduation.
Yes, the problem is clearly that you have no worked gratis for one of Ms. Hering's paying clients. Both she and CareerBuilder.com are disinterested third parties here. They're merely trying to help you. And to let you know that 1 in 4 of these lucky boys and girls will attain a dream career as a "financial representative" if all goes well. Fingers crossed!
The state of the economy also is changing the nature of work given to interns. "In this economic downturn, employers are relying increasingly on interns to shore up areas where full-time hiring has been cut," Benca notes.
Oh yeah, they want to shore the hell out of those areas. They're quite eager to replace paid employees with college kids who can be convinced to work for nothing.
So you're working for someone else for free. What's in it for you?
Benefits for you
Besides getting a foot in the door with a potential employer and looking good on a résumé, internships have other advantages:
• The opportunity to "test drive" a career (Would I be happier in marketing or advertising? Am I more comfortable working with patients or in a lab?)
• Chances to network
• Establishing relationships with mentors
• Possible college credit or certification
• An introduction to the field's culture and etiquette (Are clients addressed by their first name? Are jeans appropriate for Casual Friday?)
• Accumulating new skills
• Gaining a "real world" perspective on an occupation (How much overtime do employees really work? How much time is spent behind a desk versus in the field?)
In the fantasy world inhabited by the minions who get paid to believe in the purity of this system, interning is a really sweet deal! All you have to do is move to one of the most expensive cities in the country – preferably NY or DC, possibly LA – and live for three or four months working ~45 hours weekly without getting a paycheck. Is it too late for me to sign up? This sounds awesome. What's in it for the "employer"?
Employers do not create internships just to be nice to students and others interested in a certain career. While an interview or a company test can add to what an employer knows about a person, an internship helps an employer evaluate how an individual would fare in the actual workplace.
Like The McTigue Group, many companies develop an internship pool and hire from that group. As Benca notes, "Not only are they seeing potential employees with experience, it is experience within their company."
Ah, I see. They do it to identify and court young talent. It's like the Yankees giving a free tryout to some talented minor leaguers. It is at once benevolent and efficient. I'm going to double-check the article but I think the author forgot to mention the thousands of hours of clerical work interns end up doing without unnecessary complications like salary, benefits, or labor laws.
In reality, getting free labor out of gullible (not to mention desperate and terrified of unemployment) undergrads is only part of the rationale behind the Intern Economy and this well-rehearsed bullshit about how much it benefits students. More importantly, this system is a brutally efficient class barrier. An internship is a necessary precursor to getting a job. Having Mom and Dad cough up several thousand dollars to support you while you live in an expensive city (and do some high-class partying, er, "networking", with your fellow children of the Investor Class) is a necessary precursor to interning for free. Hmm.
In one of the best episodes of the short-lived masterpiece Fawlty Towers, Basil (John Cleese) is eager to attract a more upper-class clientele to his flophouse. So he puts an ad in the local paper for a Gourmet Night at the hotel restaurant…closing with the phrase "NO RIFF-RAFF." Would that employers could cut to the chase and be so explicit in reality. They can't, but the Intern Economy gets the job done all the same. Internships have always been reserved for those whose parents or uncles know a guy who has a summer place on the Cape next to one of the managing editors of the Times or whatever, but now that the expectation of working for free has been drummed into the heads of an entire generation the process is more efficient than ever at weeding out the ones who don't come from money.
Far be it from me to question the sincerity of someone from CareerBuilder.com, but I am not clear on why employers would eliminate 75% of college students by making the internships unpaid if their goal really is to find the best candidates for future employment. What about the potential stars who have to, you know, work and earn money in the summer? That is a curious way to structure a process intended to identify the most promising potential hires for the future. That is, after all, the whole point of internships. Right?
Grumpygradstudent says:
I agree that there is a class problem here, as there is with the education system in general, but that doesn't mean kids of all classes shouldn't be busting their asses to do these kinds of things. Cause they work.
Kids need some way to figure out what a lawyer/doctor/accountant/engineer actually does on a day-to-day basis. Maybe then we wouldn't have so many kids blindly going to law school just cause it kinda seems like a good idea. And kids need some way to make connections in a field. Cause (shocker!) your English and philosophy professors might seem smart, but chances are they don't know shit about the corporate world, and chances are the corporate world doesn't give a shit about them. These kids gotta get their social capital somewhere.
To address the class barrier issue, maybe schools (high schools AND universities) need to do a better job of integrating these types of internships and apprenticeships into the curriculum. Give kids some college credit for their work, perhaps. That way, they could get loan money to support their work.
Hugo says:
It gets a lot worse: http://esqnever.blogspot.com/2010/03/bad-dreams.html refers to the "University of Dreams" (hah!) at http://www.summerinternships.com/students/financing.php.
For a $999 deposit, and an easy payment of "as low as" $284 per month (for 36 months), they will find you an unpaid internship! That's right – not only could you work for free, but you could pay someone else over $10,000 to get you that unpaid job!
Paying to work: now we've reached neoliberal rock bottom. If we haven't, I don't want to know.
Zeb says:
Grumbygrad–
What about those of us who go to school in small or midsize towns, with few internship options? Should we be expected to move to NY or Chicago for a semester?
As a current undergrad soon to graduate, I've never had an internship. Frankly, I don't want one, for many of the reasons you outlined above. Moreover, serving coffee to lawyers for a few weeks over summer seems like a far less valuable way to spend my time than learning a new language (my usual summer activity). Hopefully this won't screw me over for the job market, but hey, I'm in the humanities, so I never had a chance to begin with.
beau says:
Grumpy – 'Kids need some way to figure out what a lawyer/doctor/accountant/engineer actually does on a day-to-day basis.'
Agreed. But the interns and former interns I know basically put in 30+ hrs/wk as an unpaid file clerk/ gofer, barely interacting with the professionals. They spent a lot more time with receptionists.
HoosierPoli says:
Hopefully now that there's some attention being paid to this, we can get some movement towards regulation of this. The last time I had an internship, I WAS offered a job…doing exactly what I had been doing in my internship. So basically they had been saving the cost of my salary getting me to work for free. And the fact that it's now essential to have unpaid work experience AT THE SAME TIME as you have been paying out tens of thousands of dollars for education puts young, vulnerable people through a fiscal vise that can take decades to recover from.
ts46064 says:
Internships remind me of apprenticeships with one major difference, the trade unions actually PAY the students for their time. Why? Because on top of learning about the job they also do work you know…like an intern.
Nathan says:
At the small magazine where I work, we have one editorial intern whom we pay about $500 a month. It's deeply shitty pay, but it's loads compared to the zero the bigger magazines (sorry, "content platforms") in our company pay the army of interns they always have around. We also don't use them for clerical, but have them writing articles and such, so they do build a portfolio, and most of the paid staff are one-time interns, so there is some truth in the ocean of bullshit from CareerBuilder. Plus we get a lot of lower middle class kids who are still living with parents in the inner suburbs, so the class barrier is not quite so high.
BUT I always cherish the fact that one of our most notoriously lazy interns shared the same last name as the editor of the biggest magazine in our building, and that she didn't even finish her term before she was hired on as an associate editor at that very same big magazine. Not that there was anything wrong with that – she had magazining in the blood!
Alex says:
Some industries have moved away from this. I had an engineering internship while in collee and got paid about half as much as a full-timer. This was significantly more than most of my non-engineer friends with 'normal' college jobs. None of the companies I looked at were ridiculous enough to expect free labor.
Prudence says:
I'm one of those spoiled brats guilty of getting a "work experience" gig in the City in London, thanks to an uncle was head of sales at what was James Capel HSBC Thingamejig. To a young, foolish and entitled me, it was a sweet job, apart from the inevitable but minor sexual harassment. However, I did come away with a very important life lesson– that the last place in the world I wanted to work was "finance", and the so-called "masters of the universe" were mostly idiots who, deep down, knew they were twits with small penises. So I put my few pennies into property, not the stock market.
The Mad Dreamer says:
As an undergrad and intern for the English Department at Relatively Small Midwestern University, I'll be up front – I was offered by my department chair either credit or money. I chose the credits.
Not that my internship requires much work – basically see if I can't get tech support to be good and train me to edit the website for the department, build a facebook presence for the department, profile graduates – but it is work.
If this was summer, I'd have been all over the pay option. There's no excuse not to at least offer payment for an internship.
Patti says:
Most internships are paid internships. If it is unpaid, then it is probably considered volunteer work for a not-for-profit – they are the last area that can really get away with this. Even with unpaid internships, they will usually assist with a stipend or housing (Chuck Colsen wants you to live with him: http://www.prisonfellowship.org/component/content/article/45/292-internship-program-guide). There are a few straggler corporations who continue to offer only unpaid internships, but they are converting. The majority of internships at corporations and through the federal government are paid, at $17 per hour. (Source: National Association of Colleges and Employers, NACEweb.org.)
Very different from when I was an undergrad, when, yes, Internships were unpaid. However, tighter labor laws on this, especially a state law in New York, have curtailed the practice of unpaid summer labor. I know there are paid internships in Akron, Peoria, Fort Wayne, Racine, and other backwoods Midwestern towns if that's where you need to go.
Keifus says:
Well to be fair, an unpaid internship will give them invaluable street smarts in the fields of marketing, sales, and "financial representative."
(One in four is their come-on? Jesus Christ.)
andrew says:
ed,
sounds like the president has stolen one of your class assignments: http://gizmodo.com/5517716/obama-wants-microsoft-to-make-a-video-game-about-us-budget
Rose says:
THANK YOU for pointing out the point that most people seem to miss. People usually grumble about unpaid internships, but the class issue never seems to be raised. This is flat out keeping poor kids away from being employable. And the kids who can, don't need to, because their parents are most likely well-connected. On a similar vein, most programs to volunteer abroad cost upwards of $5000 for a summer. Those kinds of things aren't as sought after as internships of course, but it's still an extra resume padder that's only available to the wealthy.
Hobbes says:
You can also do what I am doing (as are many of my similarly-aged coworkers) and get a starter job for a year or two after you graduate with Major Financial Company headquartered in not-NYC, get paid $60k/yr, and then take your experience and either decide corporate America blows and go get your PhD (my choice) or head up to NYC and work for the three-piece suits.
displaced Capitalist says:
LOL! So you have one chance in several hundred of getting the internship, and then 1 chance in four of actually getting a shitty job after you've wasted 4-6 months of your life. Yey!!
Barbed Wire says:
An amazing idea…that leaves me wondering how long before the city fathers get in on the gig. I mean, as a career firefighter, I'm just an insurance policy the city pays in case they need me and they're loathe to pay because I don't do anything for them. Most of our EMS clients are the uninsured who rely on us for their point-of-contact to see a doctor and of course, the new McMansion is so well built they'll never need a fire engine….
Since privatization is the answer to everything in their minds and the corporate world has all the answers to show how to run the city like a business, surely they-city fathers will soon figure out that Firefighter Intern, working for free, is the answer to our budgetary woes. They'll get a paid/volly department without the delay of waiting for someone to come from home.
Splendid idea!
Crazy for Urban Planning says:
As a recent grad who had an unpaid internship at a small government office I can say that internships are good. I wish they would hand out internships to non-students… I'd take a job if it was offered to me!
comrade x says:
My question is- what's to prevent the bosses from continuously taking advantage of of the free labor provided by interns instead of hiring some of them to replace the full- time employees that were let go?
In capitalism's inexorable race- to- the- bottom when it comes to the lives of the employees, it makes perfect sense to keep the interns in constant rotation while scaling back the full- time positions to a bare minimum, keeping only a few spots open to act as a carrot.
Tinamou says:
This post summarizes one of my college-era favorite drunken rants–I find the suggestion that students should work for free patently offensive. And the more competitive the field, the more likely it seems that employers will ask for more–full time interns rather than part time, vanishing pay, expecting interns to relocate, etc. There are huge differences in what gets called an 'internship,' from some federal programs I looked at that are essentially fixed-term entry level positions, with good pay that end in a job offer unless your really screw up, to my friend's complaints that the book publishing industry functionally requires new employees to work way more than full time, for free, for a year, in Manhattan.
I don't see offering course credit as a real plus, either, since that means that student have to pay tuition (or use up some financial aid-covered hours) for the privilege of working for free. I don't know about other schools, buy my alma matter had a rule against being paid for coursework, which meant that students often had to chose between doing the same job for $7/hr or getting course credit. We were told the latter looked better on a resume, but I always held out for pay and it doesn't seem to have hurt me.
neal says:
Obama exploits the labor of his interns just as well as the evil corporations do. the interns have no say in the matter. they're kidnapped from their posh suburban homes and their labor is simply stolen from them for weeks on end. they learn nothing, from what i hear. sadly, however, recent campaigns to which the O man and his have contributed effort/manpower have been losing.
he's still enslaving poor college students even today, despite having achieved his position in office. will this rape ever stop?
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/sofaq/
http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/NCinterns
Ed says:
It's pretty widely recognized that the abuses are worst in publishing and journalism, mostly because the number of job-seekers so badly outnumbers the paying positions. Oh, and because both industries are dying a slow death.
Nunya says:
According to the supreme court decision of 1947, unpaid internships are illegal unless they meet all of the criteria below:
1. If the training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in a vocational school;
2. If the training is for the benefit of the trainee;
3. If the trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under close observation;
4. If the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and, on occasion, the employer’s operations are actually impeded;
5. If the trainees are not necessarily entitled to employment at the completion of the training period;
6. If the employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.
This is the law. If any one of these six statements is not true about a given internship, then the interns are considered “employees” and are subject to the monetary provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. That means that the interns are entitled to minimum wage and overtime compensation.
What is lacking is any meaningful enforcement of current labor law. Students, desperate for experience, won't rock the boat by reporting these violations and the Department of Labor won't ruffle the feathers of business and risk being seen as less than business friendly.
This is a huge problem at the moment. I know of several firms that have essentially eliminated their administrative staff and keep a never-ending supply of interns cycling through to perform these functions. These will never lead to real jobs but are, in fact, simply thinly veiled slavery but without the benefits of food and shelter.
Amanda says:
This applies to doctoral education as well. I'm currently finding myself pulled up by the roots to find a program with better funding (and better training). Weeding out indeed!
Sator Arepo says:
"• An introduction to the field's culture and etiquette (Are clients addressed by their first name? Are jeans appropriate for Casual Friday?)"
Fuck! Instead of spending 10+ years in college, I could have been an intern and learned about the particulars of dress codes on casual Fridays in specific industries?
LucyTooners says:
Props for the Faulty Towers reference. That is one of my favorite characters played by John Cleese. Basil was always getting himself in some sort of trouble. My favorite though was Manuel – que?
LucyTooners says:
Hobbes: I so identify with what you say. Corporate America does blow and what these wide eyed new college graduate interns do not realize is that no amount of hard work matters to get ahead. It is who you blow and how often. In my experience with Corporate America it was the inept, backstabbing, ladder climbers that got ahead and the hard workers were stepped on and used. IMHO the reason so many corporations in America are so poorly run is because too many of the do nothing slimebuckets get promoted over the real talent and make a mess of things before they are found out. I have seen this many times in my 30 plus years of working. If I have seen it there are more.
neal says:
@LucyTooners: sounds like you know of what you speak. in 30+ yrs of corporate ladder climbing you must've blown your fair share of superiors, huh? and still at it, yeah? still taking that paycheck from the corporation? would this qualify you as a corporate whore?
Twisted_Colour says:
@neal: sounds like you're a troll. Fuck off!
heydave says:
Neal's not a whore.
He's the intern I keep under my desk.
Back to that "job" Neal!
neal says:
so wait a minute, lemme make sure i got this straight: robbing people of their labor for the mother country OK, but robbing them of their labor to give them actual real-world experience (read: non-governmental) is verboten? i think i got it! thanks! back to blowing heydave. as soon as LucyTooners is done.
Amy says:
"• An introduction to the field's culture and etiquette (Are clients addressed by their first name? Are jeans appropriate for Casual Friday?)"
Fuck! Instead of spending 10+ years in college, I could have been an intern and learned about the particulars of dress codes on casual Fridays in specific industries?
Rick says:
This applies to doctoral education as well. I'm currently finding myself pulled up by the roots to find a program with better funding (and better training). Weeding out indeed!