Every May, a fresh batch of high school grads enters the collegiate world with such high hopes. It’s a brand new start at a slightly more adult chapter of your life, and for many it’s the beginning of becoming a working citizen.

Throughout college, the other option opposite to maintaining a part-time job, whether it be your late night waitress job or a couple shifts at the local movie theatre, is obtaining the coveted internship or co-op.

I’ve personally had six of these bad boys throughout my undergraduate career. Each of them were different and all were paid. But, what interests me is that I’ve applied to countless of these things and found a lot of them were unpaid. And after pushing through the six of mine, I find that the concept of "unpaid internships" is insulting and honestly borderline cruel.

Now, I completely understand that my experience doesn’t account for even close to the way that a majority of businesses treat their interns. For all I know, every single company with the exception that the six that I’ve had internships with could worship their unpaid interns and I just got horribly unlucky!

But, for now. Here is a list of dumb things that I noticed companies do to their interns and STILL do not pay them.

Okay, first of all, some businesses don’t understand that the actual process to getting an internship approved for college credit isn’t always so simple. At my school, criteria to count for credit included duties of the internship, promised time span of working there, and even the stats of the company. I was denied for one internship to count simply because there wasn’t enough employees working there. There just seems to be this blanket assumption that college credit should be enough, and if it isn’t, sometimes that’s where your consideration as a candidate flat out stops.

Also, I’ve had so many employers give me the promise of learning so much about the field I’m pursuing and being able to be so hands on on this and that, but I’ve come to find, it almost never turns out that way. And if it is, how am I supposed to know that beforehand? As much as who we are as interns will come to a surprise after interviews, who companies are as employers will also come as a surprise to us.

Some internships have you do absolutely nothing and others have you doing SO much for no pay, but the point is, we don’t know that. I understand that’s the risk of any job that you accept, but in internships in particular when you aren’t even promised to stay as long as you’d like, sometimes it just becomes a lot of time wasted and there’s a chance you still don’t get money out of it. Unpaid interns literally walk away with nothing sometimes.

So many promises get made right at the beginning, and we have no way of knowing how well companies can back it up.

2. Businesses need extra help so they try to pass it off as an “internship program”.

I have seen so many “internship programs” claimed to have been designed because they want to help students, when in reality, they’re just temp workers used to catch up on work that a company is backlogged on. Unpaid interns basically become administrative assistants and there’s no real plan mapped out to have them learn anything or get a chance to really contribute and get that experience. I’ve had an internship even be cut short because there wasn’t work left for me to do and I was suddenly unemployed. Alternatively, I’ve had an administrative job that tried to pass off as an “internship” but ultimately all I learned how to do was file documents.

Businesses don’t prepare nearly as much as they should to even come close to being called an “internship program”.

3. Finally, and probably the most obvious, you’re making people straight choose between passion or survival.

Let’s face it. In this day and age, you need money to survive. It’s not guaranteed that every young person can lean on their parents for monetary support, so when these businesses are offering those unpaid internships, they better be thinking about the consequences. It’s simple opportunity cost. The time students invest in unpaid internships is time they could be making money that could be keeping a roof over their heads or food on their tables or paying their student loans. And again, companies promise all of this “experience” that they might not even get in the end. These unpaid internships are a straight gamble.

Also, I’m sorry, I understand the lure of an internship should be experience, but why does that negate the justification for being paid for your labor?

I’m sure you’ve all heard the “broke college kid” horror stories, but they’re a real thing. Interns invest time and labor, and yeah they might learn a lot, but come on. They’re not even worth minimum wage to you? Does that not have a “slavery” overtone to it when you hear it?

Conclusions:

Folks, it’s simple. It dates way back to that Golden Rule we all learned in kindergarten. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated.

And I’m sure as hell if all those full-timers at these companies suddenly became unpaid because their “experience” should be enough, they wouldn’t appreciate it very much.

"Will Work For Free" is a truly ugly phrase. So to all you future leaders of corporate/business America, please plan and pay for your interns. They deserve it.