Work and Business

Are Internships a Racket?

It all started innocently enough. New York University Career Services Director Ellen Walterscheid posted a routine internship request to the journalism department e-mail list.

“Seeking writers for articles and reviews for the About.com Manhattan web site. This is not a paid position, but it is a chance to get clips and see your byline on the About.com network (owned by The New York Times Company). If we love your work, we may be able to make you a regular and pay you for future articles.”

Stu VanAirsdale, a third-semester graduate student, responded promptly — but to the entire list as opposed to the employer and with disdain instead of interest.

“If a company like About.com thinks its NY Times association bears mentioning to potential freelancers,” he wrote, “then it should avoid insulting us by soliciting an honest day’s work for free. You deserve better.”

The response was immediate and explosive. For the next three days, students volleyed e-mails debating the merits of the internship system and held a discussion that has been largely kept to the insides of cubicles: While internships have become a resume staple for entry-level workers, the internships themselves are becoming less desirable — particularly in journalism.

Current interns are likely to find themselves performing administrative tasks such as stapling papers, sorting mail and answering telephones instead of getting the field experience in research, editing, reporting and writing that led them to apply in the first place. Worse, not only are many coveted internships in expensive metropolitan areas like New York City, they are unpaid and do not lead to permanent positions as such apprenticeships did in the past.

“A lot of those internships simply are not going to lead to jobs,” said Ernest Sotomayor, director of Career Services at the Columbia School of Journalism. “There’s not a lot of value to that, particularly if it’s an unpaid position. You can work or freelance at other places.”

“If an internship is largely grunt work, it’s generally not worth the student’s time,” Walterscheid agreed. “Students should look for opportunities to do hands-on editorial work.”

Many students feel some experience is better than none, however, and so continue to take whatever internships they can. “Most students I work with do at least one or two internships before they graduate,” Walterscheid said. According to school documents, 81 NYU students are taking an internship for credit this fall. It is uncertain how many students are doing internships — paid or unpaid — on a noncredit basis.

Very few journalism students at Columbia University hold internships, says Sotomayor.

“Our curriculum is very rigorous here,” he said. Master’s candidates at Columbia condense their education into 10 months, whereas NYU offers a three-semester program. “They do a lot of reporting in the introductory reporting course. The level of work doesn’t allow them enough time to devote 15-20 hours a week at an internship.”

In contrast, NYU encourages students to take an internship during their final semester. As the journalism student population has skyrocketed in the past few years, the competition for internships has similarly climbed — making these below-entry-level positions as difficult to get as some paying jobs. With only about 20 percent of these positions paid by Walterscheid’s estimate, and only an estimated 15 percent of NYU students being hired out of their internships in the present economy, these bleak numbers leave many rising journalists feeling frustrated.

Adding to the financial conundrum, many of these internships must be taken for academic credit, which means students are paying thousands of dollars, in effect, to work for free at a place where they have little hope of ever landing a job.

“Think about it this way,” said Jamey Bainer, a NYU master’s candidate, “no one used to go to grad school to do this job. Some of the best barely finished high school, if anything. So what are we all doing, suddenly required to have master’s degrees to qualify for an internship that won’t earn us a dime to live in one of the most inspiring but most expensive cities in the world?”

“It seems to me that journalism schools shouldn’t offer for-credit internships — then publications might be required to pay us,” said Ashley Harrell, a third-semester magazine student in the NYU master’s program.

“But why would journalism schools want to get rid of the for-credit internships?” she added. “They get four grand and don’t even have to compensate a professor. What do we get? Less school.”

Walterscheid explained that many employers require credit because of labor and insurance laws. She encouraged students to seek summer internships in other parts of the country besides New York City, where they can either live at home or more cheaply than here.

“[An internship] is the chance to learn something real,” Walterscheid said. “Important contacts can be made at an internship, and those should not be taken lightly.”

“I would not have been hired for my (paid, not-for-credit, reporting) internship at the East Hampton Star last summer had it not been for my enrollment at NYU,” wrote Ulysses James de la Torre in an e-mail message. A recent graduate, he has managed to become gainfully employed. “I walked into the job with no published clips to my credit and walked out with about 12 or 13.”

De la Torre also worked as an intern for the Daily News. After graduating with a joint-degree in journalism and Latin American studies in May, he is currently on a journalism fellowship at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico in Mexico City.

So, does the system work? What advice can be offered to those feeling stifled by the internship method?

“New York offers this cornucopia of opportunities to write for media companies,” Sotomayor said. “Students can freelance to daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, online magazines, monthly print magazines. It is a very competitive field, but there is no place in the country that has more opportunities to write.”

“The most I think I can do for now is sniff out the editors whose goals and principles seem well matched with mine,” said De la Torre, “and vow not to ever get too full of myself or forget what it’s like to be at the bottom in this business.”