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Last week the Daily Dish linked to a new blog called Spotted: DC Summer Interns, which essentially publishes anecdotes about the naivety and ignorance of Washington DC's summer interns. In fairness, though, it seems like most of the abuse is directed at Congressional interns, who of course are fully unpaid.
Now, I've always been
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Comments
06.11.09
Having been a summer unpaid intern during college, and later a paid intern for an international humanitarian agency where I did my independent project as an undergrad, and was later offered a full time well paying job, I can tell you interns are no less or more intelligent than anyone else. Especially if you see some of the non intern workers. Now that would he a good blog.
There are a lot of people running around who come from parents with a lot of money, a lot of them do not have to work, though some of them have second jobs.
People here do commute, sometime up to 45 miles away, that is really not unusual in this area for all ages. It is sometimes due to housing costs, but often by choice, as the district is not really a very culturally interesting or diverse place. If you grow up in a commuter area it is not so strange.
Interns serve a variety of purposes, some of it is just to give people interested or possibly interested in public service a chance to see what goes on, in other instances it is to see if someone is worth offering a job to.
The D.C. intern blog is funny but it is much like the Post Secret Blog, not all real. Some of it is made up or at least enhanced. I think there are people working everywhere who are sometimes frustrated with their co-workers I'm sure it's not limited to interns.
Medical students are routinely made fun of in research hospitals as are interns, in large law firms it's probably the law clerks and so on and so forth.
06.11.09
Just want to point out that many unpaid internships are found in non-profits which just don't have the revenue to pay all their interns - their administrative costs would go up and donors would be less likely to donate.
It's an unfortunate product of the non-profit world, but you can't just say "all unpaid interns should be paid" without examining the reasons behind this thoroughly. I'd love to see it change, but people's expectations of nonprofits and government work has to change before this can.
06.11.09
I love the DC interns blog -- it's hilarious. I asked a friend about it -- she worked on the Hill for 9 years so I asked her how much truth she thinks there is to this blog and if interns are really THAT bad as the blog depicts. Her answer was yes, most of them are. Of course, they don't all fit the stereotype, but for every good, dedicated, hardworking Hill intern in her office, she would get three more interns who were just there on their parents' money and did act like the interns written about in that blog. You're rigt that unpaid internships weed out talent -- a lot of the college kids who can afford to do unpaid Congressional internships are not the smartest or best students but are people who want the prestige of working on the Hill, and want to have a fun summer in DC. And most normal people can't afford to do that for no salary. But then again, most summer internships don't exactly give you real work to do, so maybe the best talent belongs elsewhere, doing substantial work and getting more experience.
06.11.09
I can attest to this. I'm working full-time, salary, benefits, etc. post-college but during college I had 5 internships (3 of which were unpaid).
You're right Rob, it is really hard to afford to work for "free," but I ended up having my paid job, going to college and then part-time internship(s). I always thought that if you wanted to get your foot in the door, I didn't think it's wrong to have an unpaid internship. I took it as a privilege. If we EXPECT to be paid but have little-to-no experience, what does that show employers? To me, the experience was how I was getting paid and in the end, it "paid" off because I got a full-time job after college with ease. Employers were impressed that I put that much time and effort into internships, that often are, unpaid.
Also to Akhila's point, one of my internships was with a non-profit and it was unpaid. I wouldn't trade that for the world and although there might be less talent with interns, there is still a strong group of college students eager to gain experience and devote their time (usually it's for class credit anyway, so it's all part of the education process). Some internships are hard to land, with a competitive pool of 50+ people, which lets you find a fabulous intern, even if you can't afford to pay them.
Great thoughts here--got my mind thinking!
06.11.09
Sigh. I hate it when people write authoritatively about something they don't know about.
I hire unpaid interns, and I've never had a problem getting high-quality ones. Like with any position, if they're not good, we replace them with someone who is.
Why do we hire them? Because we get free labor in exchange for giving them experience that they couldn't otherwise get at this stage in their careers. I wouldn't hire these guys to do this work if it were paid; I would hire someone with more experience who wouldn't need as much guidance. But I'll hire someone smart and capable to work for free, with the trade-off being that I know we'll need to spend more time guiding them.
06.13.09
I've seen a rise in unpaid internships with the economic downturn and while I can empathize with both sides of the debate, the reality is that unpaid internships self-select for socioeconomic demographics that can "afford" to be unpaid -- afford to cover living expenses outside of the job, afford to pay the tuition credits that are often required, etc. When I ran internhsip recruiting for a large media company, paid internships were unusual in our field but were necessary to open the field to a more diverse population.
06.13.09
It seems pretty simple to me. If you don't like or believe in unpaid internships, don't take one. Problem solved.
06.16.09
There are many unpaid internship but if your looking for an extra money be a blood donor and get paid $50/hour to donate blood! As we all know, Blood bank shortages kill tons of people all the time. Let's spread the blood donation and give blood, you will never know when You might need blood.
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