If there’s any job that’s coveted during college, it’s a paid internship. Think about it: experience you need for your future job with the added bonus of getting paid. Ideal, right? Internships in general exist for students to gain the experience they need for applying for full-time jobs, but students tend to gravitate toward the paid ones solely for the fact that they get some sort of monetary compensation.
An article by Melissa Korn of The Wall Street Journal, however, argues the fact that the point of internships should not be at all about making money, but to “help a student learn more about a prospective field, gain experience in that field and supplement their classroom experience.”
In other words, students shouldn’t partake in an internship program if their sole purpose is to get paid for it. Instead, they should utilize any type of internship to gain knowledge and an upper hand against prospectiv e job-seekers with no internship experience.
Here at Azusa Pacific, the Office of Career Services helps students with the process of obtaining an internship, something that Graduate Programs Manager Thomas Eng feels every student should have.
“I think students should get an internship because it’s the piece that puts your education in practice. At the same time, it allows you to build your bullet points in your resume,” said Eng.
Along with those benefits, some students are even able to get a job at the company where they are interning. A 2012 survey done by internships.com found “69 percent of companies with 100 or more employees made full-time job offers to their interns.”
The survey didn’t take into account whether or not these internships were paid, but quite frankly, that factor isn’t important compared with getting the experience needed for resumes and maybe even being hired for a job.
“If it’s unpaid, you want to make sure it’s the best educational experience you can get possible,” said Eng. “If it’s unpaid, but you know you’re going to get a lot of those skills you need to do that job, that’s not that bad of a thing.”
A lot of the time, I hear the term “forced slavery” when people talk about unpaid internships, as a lot of students see it as a position where you’re only given busy-work; however, such a practice is actually illegal under the federal law.
According to a 2013 article by Forbes magazine, the U.S. Supreme Court came up with six factors that determine whether an internship without compensation can be legally offered. These factors include that “the internship experience is for the benefit of the intern” and “the employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.”
Basically, unpaid internships legally cannot become a new form of slavery, and it’s ridiculous to attach that name to it. In an internship, the intern must benefit in some way from it, a quality that slavery obviously doesn’t have.
“It all falls down onto if your supervisor is going to actually train you to do the right things, if it’s a structured program so that there’s going to be a strong accountability,” said Eng.
With a well-structured internship, interns usually won’t find themselves running for coffee or doing photocopies all day. Instead, they have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the workplace and interact with various employees while using skills they were taught in class.
A 2013 CNN article encourages interns to embrace the structure, saying: “In a structured internship program, there’s considerably less room for busy-work or (even worse) dead time. Interns’ schedules are instead packed with meetings, events or seminars.”
I get it. You’re a poor college student barely surviving on a ramen-noodle diet, and a paid internship just sounds more ideal. However, when it comes down to it, any sort of internship, paid or not, will give you the experience you need in the long run. It’s that experience that will get you a job after college, not the money you made.