There’s nothing glamorous about summer internships. I’m sure every college student can relate to this sentiment. It’s the end of the academic year, so if you haven’t yet finalized your summer internship plans, you’re either so confident about your employability post-graduation that you’ve transcended the physical world and are now levitating, or you’re emailing/calling/sending carrier pigeons to every person that is vaguely connected to your field of study and are telling employees of companies you’ve never heard of that you’re “extremely excited” to get involved with them. The internship search is survival of the fittest, and in terms of how cutthroat it can get, I think it’s safe to say we’re at the dystopian, mad despot level.
Even if you’re one of the lucky ones who's managed to secure that precious internship, you’re surely aware of two things: the first is that most companies will make you do grunt work that does not in any way require a college degree. Internships used to be founded on the idea that you could get practical skills in your field of study that couldn’t be taught in a classroom. Today, they’re more about finding someone to do all of the menial tasks nobody else is interested in. Answering phones, making coffee, and moderating Twitter feeds are not skills you can only get in a work environment. In fact, I would argue that a dorm room is better for all of those things. But put the depressing workload aside for a moment, because there’s a bigger issue to discuss. Many of these internships are not paid positions. I can’t tell you how many times I filled out an entire internship application for a summer position here in New York, only to get to the last page and see the tiny disclaimer: “This internship is unpaid.”
I said that there’s nothing glamorous about internships. Since that’s true, an unpaid internship is downright demoralizing. Employers who don’t pay their interns would disagree with me. There’s a lot of talk about how it teaches college students the pleasure of hard work for a cause that you believe in or are passionate about. Others say that, though interns don’t get paid, if they work hard enough, many of them can get job offers from the company in question and that interns are paid in networking and experience. And then there’s the excuse that, a la Jessie J, it’s not about the bling.
For most debt-ridden college students, though, internships are not about the bling, but the rent, food, transportation, and if you’re really lucky, the savings account and maybe some fun outings with friends. If an internship requires a full-time commitment but also doesn’t pay, how are the interns in question expected to live? I don’t mean that in the colloquial, “can I live” sense either. Experience is a currency nearly impossible to spend, and I’m pretty sure it’s not accepted by most landlords and grocery stores, and certainly not accepted by the giant, soul sucking corporation that is the MTA.
Most college students use summer internships as a way to save for the whole year: whatever is made over those three months is used to pay for expenses accrued during the school year, when work hours are far less flexible, and focus diverted towards getting that degree that is supposed to assure us a job upon graduation (also problematic, but that’s another article.)
Part of the problem is that pop culture depictions of unpaid internships make them out to be glamorous, a necessary step towards attainment of that dream job. You have to rough it to earn that dream job. Think about it: how many movies or TV shows have you seen where a character claims to have no money but is still somehow able to afford to live in Midtown Manhattan, dress like a fashion model, and has a “favorite bar” they’re at every night. In real life, though, unpaid interns can’t afford any of that, unless you’re in the lucky position of being able to be bankrolled by your parents. If you’re not, it’s more likely that you’re wearing the same outfit three times a week and spending your evenings eating peanut butter off of a spoon while sponging Netflix from your roommate.
Some might think that this is another one of those “Millennial” problems and dismiss my article as whiny, demanding and selfish. But just two weeks ago, the Australian government came under fire for offering summer internships that paid just four dollars an hour. That is a sum of money that simply cannot be tenable. There’s nothing entitled about asking for compensation for hard work. Interns aren’t demanding a corner office or a company card: all they’re asking for is fair treatment.
In the pilot episode of HBO’s “Girls,” Hannah Horvath’s parents tell her that they can no longer afford to support her while she works at an unpaid internship at a New York City literary agency. When she tells her boss that she can “no longer afford to work for free” he asks her if she thinks she’s learned all she can from them. “No!” she says, “Just-- gotta eat.” After her boss tells her they’re going to miss her and she's let go, the scene cuts to Hannah calculating how many more days she can live in the city without a paid job. It’s three, but she thinks she can stretch to seven, “if I don’t eat lunch.” When I saw it, I laughed. And then felt miserable.
