I’m in a bit of an interesting situation right now. I did a volunteer internship last summer, but was actually offered a $700 stipend a few weeks after I started. Since I was volunteering for a charity, I didn’t want to take any of their money away. However, I’m in a situation now where I have to decide whether to say my internship was paid or unpaid on the common app. Either of these is essentially true, especially since I could collect the $ any time I want. My question is: does it look better to have a paid or unpaid internship? It seems to me like paid implies that it’s fairly important/they like you.
If they’re giving you money, I’d say it’s paid. you know, money is payment and all.
But if I don’t accept it I’d say it isn’t. I honestly think either is true, I’m just wondering which one would look better on application.
If you took or plan to take money for your work it is paid, if not it is volunteer. It isn’t really a big deal either way.
Why do you even have to specify whether its paid or unpaid???
Iwas just thinking that one might look better. I guess I don’t have to specify.
It doesn’t matter. Since it is gray, I would leave it out.
The only reason not to accept payment would be if this is the only volunteer experience you have or can do before you submit applications to colleges, and you want to be sure to have something to put in the “volunteer” section of an application. Otherwise, you could take the payment and put it down as “work experience,” which is usually another field on a college application. If you don’t have any other work experience, then you have to consider that this field will also be blank if you don’t accept the money.
Since some volunteers actually do receive stipends, there could be the potential argument that you were still a volunteer even with the stipend, but that seems like a stretch at $700. Here’s an interesting article that explores whether volunteers who accept a stipend are still volunteers or not. It says generally the cutoff would be anything over $500 a year would make you an employee (who owes taxes), but there can be exceptions:
http://www.nonprofitrisk.org/library/articles/employee_or_volunteer.shtml
I’d also say whether or not it ends up working out to minimum wage would count. But honestly what’s important is what you did and what your responsibilities were not whether it should be called work or volunteer. I’d say volunteer btw.
Hi all, thanks for your answers. I’ve decided to go w/ volunteering, even though the work experience looks light on my app (did a few music things for money), volunteering isn’t too great either w/o it, 80 hours at another internship.