<p>Is it true that internships are trial period jobs with very little pay (I'm being told next to nothing.) and are "peon" (as I'm told) jobs? I was just wondering about that. Maybe this needs to go into another forum, but I wanted it to get more attention than from that forum. I'm sorry if this is in the wrong forum. Anyways, can anyone confirm this that other people are telling me?</p>
<p>Yes, they are trial period jobs in the sense that companies offer internships to students they think they might like to have work for them after graduation. I'm sure that some of them are low pay (or even no pay). But it depends. People with high level technical skills may be able to get very highly paid internships. Some of the companies recruiting at MIT, for instance, are offering very highly paid internships.</p>
<p>Well, my school is no MIT, and I keep hearing that the jobs offered to students at my school are low pay and I heard one was even no pay. I was actually more interested in if intern work is "peon" work or not, that is if it is getting coffee and donuts or if it involves technical skills.</p>
<p>Every internship is different. It is up to you to research the ones you are interested in, and find out! :)</p>
<p>Depends on what you are going into. Washington jobs, PR, film, etc its "peon" work, but banking/ consulting its very legitimate (long hours/ high pay). Media/ fashion are known to give lots of tedious boring work, but people are clamouring to get into these industries so the companies can get away with it.</p>
<p>Just my two cents but I have done two internships/paid and the cost of traveling to, housing, living expenses cost me more than I ever made and the pay wasn't so bad. I learned lots and have gotten other opportunities because of the letters of rec etc. I am likely going to intern this summer for no/low pay and in DC. As to the cost: many colleges will allow a student to report this negative cash situation from the employment and roll it into a low interest loan or grant from the college. You should inquire with your financial aid office. This helps to modify the access to internships.....ie only those who can pay can play.</p>
<p>it depends on the internship. it's a trial period job in the sense that, yes, the company may consider hiring you later, but also in the sense that you get to try out that industry and see if you like it. even if you're just getting coffee or doing filing, you still have a behind-the-scenes look at everything that goes on in that world, and you can see if you like the pace, the atmosphere, the hours, the type of people who work in the field, etc. it's more of a learning experience than a rent-paying one, although if you're lucky you can get one that's both.</p>
<p>I hire interns -we used to call them summer hires- depending on the individual and company- it might or might not be 'peon' work. Whether it is or isnt, you should learn a significant amount by seeing how a company /business works .... IT may not be intended but if I was interviewing you and you asked a question like is it 'peon' work , I wouldnt be impressed. IF you could turn it around and say, I want to be sure and make the most of any opportunity.. look at it that way, no</p>
<p>Our company-media- has unpaid summer interns. The point is for them to see the business from the inside and see if the might want to work in this industry. How much or how little they do is mostly up to them. Why don't we pay them? Because we don't need them. We have a year round staff, but we let a few students come for a month in the summer to see what the indstry is like. They can use it on their resumes. They do learn, but don't contribute that much (with one nioable excepton we hired) not because they don't want to, but because they don't have the skills yet. It's more a favor to them than a help to us, especially since summer is our slow season anyway. It may be very different in law firms, etc.</p>
<p>Our company-media- has unpaid summer interns. The point is for them to see the business from the inside and see if the might want to work in this industry. How much or how little they do is mostly up to them. Why don't we pay them? Because we don't need them. We have a year round staff, but we let a few students come for a month in the summer to see what the indstry is like. They can use it on their resumes. They do learn, but don't contribute that much (with one nioable excepton we hired) not because they don't want to, but because they don't have the skills yet. It's more a favor to them than a help to us, especially since summer is our slow season anyway. It may be very different in law firms, etc.</p>
<p>Many jobs are too complex for an intern to do much of real substance, unless they studied in a technical field. If the entire summer were spent training the intern, it would be a class not an internship. </p>
<p>Therefore, in most cases, an intern should expect to spend the summer doing something full time employees don't want to do. Whether that consists of filing, copying, answering phones, or mindlessly inputting numbers into a spreadsheet all day, the actual task is not the point of the summer. </p>
<p>The firm's goal is to find people with a good work ethic and team spirit who are worth the time and effort to train as permanent employees and to provide a community service by allowing college kids to observe first hand the culture of the work environment. If the intern impresses, he will get favorable letters of recommendation and potentially a job offer or help finding other job possibilities. </p>
<p>Back in my grad school days, I interned at a US Embassy in Africa. The job consisted of essentially being the Ambassador's secretary for the summer while his real secretary took vacation. I learned a lot, however, about the flavor of working in the foreign service. I highly recommend internships as invaluable ways to test out different work environments. </p>
<p>FYI, be prepared to do a lot of peon work in your first "real" job as well as any internship.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Therefore, in most cases, an intern should expect to spend the summer doing something full time employees don't want to do. Whether that consists of filing, copying, answering phones, or mindlessly inputting numbers into a spreadsheet all day, the actual task is not the point of the summer.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>In all honestly, that's what the first two - three months was in my first real job, too. And that was after some extensive formal training.</p>
<p>It really is a good thing on both sides. It's a relatively non-stressful way for you to learn your way around the business and the business learns a lot about how you work. That's a hint that you want to do even the things you find the most mindless as well as you possibly can, especially when no one's around to check up on you, btw. Sometimes it's a test of character.</p>
<p>A summer internship is a wonderful way to gain exposure to Real Life Work in just about any field. What you do isnt as important as who you meet and what you learn. At many colleges helping kids find and secure summer internships is a high priority of the career counseling office. The one with big name firms or organizations are highly competitive. </p>
<p>Pay is variable. High profile summer internships in finance or law in urban centers go for something like $10,000, which, to me, sounds like a huge amount of money. These represent a small percentage of all summer internships, however: most are unpaid or pay a token amount. </p>
<p>Formal summer internships at the major U.S. museums, for example, offer a stipend of $2,000-3,000. Smaller or less well financed museums pay in the hundreds or not at all. The competition for both is fierce.</p>
<p>The work is also variable. Some big firms and organizations have structured internship programs in which they rotate their interns from department to department, giving them a wide exposure to all aspects of the business or field. </p>
<p>At some smaller enterprises the intern gets to work side-by-side with the movers and shakers. Others, both large and small, just need an extra pair of hands and the intern ends up fetching coffee and making photo copies. </p>
<p>In part its up to the intern to learn, to network, to observe, to soak up the experience. I agree with rty: if you see it as "peon" work, you're missing an opportunity.</p>
<p>I understand that its also become fashionable for college graduates to intern before settling down to a real career. This is a more controversial issue and one school of thought advises graduates not to work for free no matter how much you want the experience. I guess it depends on the organizations ability to pay. NGOs or organizations involved in the arts may not have the cash. This trend is also another dilemma for us parents who expect our kids to be self-supporting post graduation.</p>
<p>The son of friends had a summer job with a political NGO here in Asia. Although the experience was invaluable (he actually government influenced policy), the pay was negligible. He was paid the local minimum wage which amounted to about $0.25 an hour. This made a good story when he was back at his elite East Coast college and was a good lesson in global economics as well. :)</p>
<p>There must be great variation in these things. I can only speak for the kind my son (and most of his friends) had before graduating with computer science and business degrees.</p>
<p>Internship is a big thing for these types of fields. I recall his interviews for the one he eventually accepted (keep in mind this is for just a summer internship) consisted of a couple hours on campus on day one, a couple hours again on campus the next day ( for those who made the day one cut), then they sent him a plane ticket and hotel room in NYC on for 2 more interviews (one AM one PM) at one of their NY locations.</p>
<p>The internship pay was prorated according to a first year hire...60K divided by 52 wks so almost $1200 per week, good for plenty of spending money his senior year. Worked 11 wks so made ~13,000 for the summer, no small change there.</p>
<p>It was explained to him the internship was like an 11 week job interview. </p>
<p>I'm sure the work they did was meaningful...a project he and his team worked on as interns is still being used by the company. Also included dinners, happy hours, "ice cream socials", barbecues, boat rides around Manhattan, a day volunteering for Special Olympics on LI, bowling, the entire internship class of 120 in his division saw the Broadway play Wicked, on and on, since they are at that point recruiting you (or some of you) for full time employment.</p>
<p>Another bonus...got job offer from this NYC firm Sept of senior year...rest of the year was a breeze knowing where he'd be the end of July.</p>
<p>I work at a small company and have hired several college interns. I have been very disappointed with the majority of them, as they only want to do the fun and exciting work, not the day-to-day grind.</p>
<p>A student can learn a lot working in a small company and seeing how many hats it requires to be successful in a small business. Somebody has to make sure the coffee is filled and stock TP, enter data for mail campaigns and execute them, clean up databases of information, move and reconfigure computers, etc. Even the president and other top managers help out when needed. (Actually the president spent 2 hours last week taking empty shipping boxes to the recycling center.)</p>
<p>It's just always amazing to me when students come in and feel that work is "beneath them". There is definitely a sense of entitlement that gets knocked down when taking an internship. The people at my company that get the most respect are the ones who help the most with the day-to-day operations when needed - the prima donnas don't last very long and are never invited back.</p>
<p>AnyMom, I second your disappointment. I had such a bad experience with one of our interns last summer that I am not going to accept an intern this summer because I just don't have the mental energy to deal with one this year. </p>
<p>This kid was extremely nice, but produced sloppy, error prone work. He had a short attention span and appeared bored with projects that required a lot of checking and rechecking for accuracy. He treated assignments like hot potatoes as if he would somehow get points for speed of execution (which just meant I had to find something else for him to do to keep him busy). The fact that the output was always subpar didn't seem to bother him. Maybe he equated it to getting a B instead of an A. But, in our industry (finance) anything short of flawless is worthless. Imagine a bank teller giving out the wrong amount of change and shrugging it off as close enough.</p>
<p>In his exit interview, he talked about how much he had learned. I told him his major takeaway from the summer should be that he was not suited to this type of work. He never did seem to understand how unhappy I was with his work, despite my telling him repeatedly. When he sent an email last week asking for a letter of recommendation, I was positively stunned (and refused). </p>
<p>I am giddy about this summer being intern-free for the first time in a decade.</p>
<p>This thread reminds me about the manager trainee I hired once upon a time. He left after six weeks because he didn't see the path of advancement -- since the store already has a manager and an owner.</p>
<p>Well kiddies -- the moral of the story is that the qualification to be the manager is to work more than six weeks, and to learn everything that needs to be done to open the doors successfully on a daily basis (i.e. sweeping the floor is part of that). The qualification to be the owner is to have a very large sum of cash and not need a paycheck for doing everything from sweeping the floor to signing the paychecks of others.</p>
<p>Following are some descriptions of internships on the net:</p>
<p>The Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, CA - for hs juniors & seniors
<a href="http://www.molsci.org/Dispatch?action-WebdocWidget:5146-detail=1%5B/url%5D">http://www.molsci.org/Dispatch?action-WebdocWidget:5146-detail=1</a></p>
<p>Montgomery County Public Schools
<a href="http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/springbrookhs/interns/internprogram.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/springbrookhs/interns/internprogram.html</a></p>
<p>Penn State
<a href="http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/f/j/fja100/internship/theinternship.htm#whatisaninternship%5B/url%5D">http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/f/j/fja100/internship/theinternship.htm#whatisaninternship</a></p>
<p>U of Wisconsin
<a href="http://www.uwec.edu/career/students/internships/what_is_an_internship.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.uwec.edu/career/students/internships/what_is_an_internship.htm</a></p>
<p>City U of New York
<a href="http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/vpstud/careerservices/whatisaninternship.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/vpstud/careerservices/whatisaninternship.html</a></p>
<p>Texas A&M U
<a href="http://careercenter.tamu.edu/guides/internship/whatintern.html%5B/url%5D">http://careercenter.tamu.edu/guides/internship/whatintern.html</a></p>
<p>CSU Long Beach
<a href="http://www.careers.csulb.edu/students/jobs/internships/intern_whatisaninternship.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.careers.csulb.edu/students/jobs/internships/intern_whatisaninternship.html</a></p>
<p>There are many other descriptions on the net...</p>
<p>All true, there is that sense of entitlement that seems more obvious today. </p>
<p>But I think if we were to go back and observe our earliest work performances we'd be a little surprised. I too have had students do rotations thru my office...more trouble than it's worth, some are great and some are awful, but they have to start somewhere. Precisely why the internship is as important for the employer as it is for the employee.</p>
<p>If you're looking for that big NYC internship like a lot of CC kids are, you know you'll be working hard and long and I believe the majority of them at that level are aware of that and aren't afraid to work.</p>
<p>For interns, do not ask if you can leave early Friday or take a long weekend because a friend has invited you to their beach house and you are mostly just xeroxing anyway. yes, you may not be getting paid, but believe it or not it's a competitive position (many more studens ask for internships than are available at our company). Interns wanting to leave early or take long weekends happens a lot and everyone notices.</p>