Money & Work
The Struggling Interns
Students who need to earn money while in college find it hard to take on those all-important unpaid internships.
ams461@nyu.edu
Mandy Dutton, a sophomore at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York City, is a busy young woman: She’s taking 20 credits at school, and working 20 hours a week as an intern at a New York City fashion magazine. And though she’s so involved with filing, photocopying, and doing other administrative tasks that she can barely take a lunch break, she doesn’t earn a cent.
To make money, she travels for four hours by bus to her hometown every other weekend and works as a health-care aid, a job she has had for three years. “It’s frustrating because I work during the week, and then I go home and work the entire weekend,” says Dutton.
Still, she feels she doesn’t have much of a choice. She does the health-care job because she needs to earn money, and she views her unpaid internship as critical for her career: “If I don’t do it, that could hurt my chances getting a job [since I will be competing against people who] didn’t have to work for money and could just do back-to-back internships,” she says.
While students from affluent families may be more easily able to build their resume through unpaid jobs, even those who can’t really afford them are finding ways to make them work. That’s because, like Dutton, students are aware of the critical importance internships provide.
“Demand for entry level jobs [in many fields] is greater than the availability of jobs, and internships have become a prerequisite of getting a job,” says Gina Neff, a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and editor of Surviving the New Economy. This is particularly true in glamorous industries, such as publishing, public relations, advertising and broadcasting.
For some, that “prerequisite” creates a huge burden. According to Dalton Conley, sociology professor at New York University, the pressure to complete multiple internships before graduating from college puts students who are not financially privileged at a big disadvantage.
“If you are working your butt off to pay off student loans, then doing unpaid internships is not an option,” Conley says. This just compounds the sense of inequality, he says. Conley believes that—financial considerations aside—privileged students are better off because they often have connections that are informally created through family and friends. “Non-privileged students don’t have the ease of their dad being good friends with the local congressman or the owner of a big business.”
Whether or not internships are worth the sacrifice they may entail is a matter of debate. Some involve merely doing grunt work to the point where the experience is not really valuable to the student’s education. “It’s buyer beware, says Neff. “Students need to be really careful. They need to ask hard questions and make sure they will be getting a good experience they can benefit from.”
According to Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s higher education spokesperson, an increasing number of schools require students to take an internship course during their junior or senior year. So even if the students aren’t getting paid, they are earning credit for all their time and hard work. “Internships expose you to something while you are still in undergrad, that you would never ever want to do after graduating,” Franek says. “Students and parents need to focus on the experience that they are getting, not necessarily the money.”
According to Trudy Steinfeld, executive director of the Wasserman Center for Career Development at New York University, some schools are starting to offer stipends to select students who can’t afford to do unpaid internships. Stipends usually range between $1,000 - $2,000 for a semester, or about four months, and although a student can probably earn more bartending or waitressing, it’s still a sum of money going back into the students’ pocket. Steinfeld tells students who can’t afford unpaid internships to try and balance both schoolwork and internships, or to work during the summer to save money so they can do their internships during the school year.
Others say that it’s important to make sure that internship opportunities are available to all students, not just a privileged few. “One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is how can we support diversity of voice,” Neff says. “We need to make sure that there are programs to support people who are trying to break into careers at the very earliest levels.”
Mandy Dutton works as health-care aide for the money—and an intern for the professional experience.
Photo courtesy of Mandy Dutton