<p>Here in NYC, there are A LOT of illegal internships. And kids desperate to get one because, yes, it can impact getting a job in the industry and even at the specific company. My son was getting ripped off on an “internship” until I told him that it was game over for that gig. He was hired and now has a job in Manhattan that a lot of people in the field would a lot to get, and yes, it is with the company that had the very illegal internship that violated every thing an internship is legally required to be. I know a dozen such cases off the bat that operate that way.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, my husband’s firm got a complaint and underwent investigation for having internships that allegedly violated the law, when, not only are these paid, but are true training experiences that follow the letter of the law. Someone expecting a job offer who did not get one complained. The company was cleared, but now they don’t do internships. </p>
<p>Someplaces will just out and out call it shadowing or volunteer work. It’s ridiculous how this internship situation has taken off. My kid’s high school has a formal program for seniors where they can be placed into “internships” and I don’t believe for a second that most of them meet the legal definition.</p>
<p>“To me, the most galling part is that he would be setting up for meetings and cleaning up after meetings but not allowed to sit in on meetings.”
-At my place even consultants who are involved in daily operations are not allowed to be at employees’ meetings, let alone some un-paid intern. I do not think so!! There are certain discussions that are not for outsiders’ ears.</p>
<p>I disagree with the notion that all interns should be paid. I’m not sure what the technical definition used by the government and all is, but I can fathom a situation where – in all senses – the intern is more a burden than an aid.</p>
<p>I’m trying very hard to get an internship at a think-tank/university nearby and am entirely ok not to get paid because of the experience I would be getting. I do hope to contribute, but I certainly don’t think I should be compensated at the level of people who “work” there.</p>
<p>In many ways an internship is someone who’s learning and benefitting more than he is contributing, in which case unpaid is just fine.</p>
<p>I guess it depends on the company. When my s was a summer intern at a big O&G (oil and gas)company, not only did he sit in on meetings, he was sent on a conference.</p>
<p>Some interns are contributing, but it does not mean that they absolutely have to be paid. If paying is required, internships will be killed just like min. wage requirement is killing many jobs for young people. I hope that it will not happen. But personally I do not care as both of my kids re beyond that, it will negatively affect their kids .
BTW, those who want PAID internship positions, should get into COOP programs. They are great and insure kids’ future employment as most enter the work force at one of the places that they were working previously. My S. was in such program as Graphic Design major. They are 5 years, instead of 4. So, again, they are choices. Assess your goals and choose what is the best. But require to pay for intern position is to kill it for everybody. I do not think it is fair. Most will not like that.</p>
<p>^Again, many work at one place and intern at another, many, in fact, probably most around my D. when she was in UG, and they still volunteer at 3rd place…</p>
<p>This problem is now infecting the high schools.
My daughter is a senior. The school requires they do an internship for the last two months of the year.
My daughter has worked for over a year at a paying retail job. She has to give that up because she can’t receive any money and is interning at another retail job, at which place she is the only unpaid person.</p>
<p>Perhaps member of the Congrass is on a higher leveal than everyone else.</p>
<p>My friend’s D is a poly science major, her summer intership with a local US congrass person was without pay. She was lucky to have that, because the office normally receives 1000’s of applications from all over the world. She was allowed to intern only X number of weeks because too many applicants in the line. The students work there are mostly HYPS type and she was an exception.</p>
<p>So the 50% of internships that are paid (using the NYT estimate) shouldn’t be called internships? I used to have to keep an intern busy every summer and the intern’s job certainly met all of the other criteria on Mini’s list, particularly the impeding business part, and they were all well paid. One summer, the intern was both paid and received course credit. He also happened to be the worst intern I ever had. He cared more about the course credit than the job, saying it didnt matter what he did on the job because his professor loved him and he would get an A in the course regardless of my evaluation. That was the first time I had ever heard of this either/or thing with internships, course credit, and getting paid. I dont understand why you cant have bothguess our firm made an error that year, but it never happened again. In fact that intern did so much damage, I refused to take another one for several years.</p>
<p>My younger son just finalized the details for an internship this summer in engineering. As far as I know all of the engineering internships are paid. However, getting one of these positions is not easy and it took every bit as much effort as finding a full-time post-graduation job. He started applying for everything he could find the fall of his sophomore year in the hopes of finding something the following summer. He pursued every single lead he could find to no avail and ended up bussing tables, taking some summer classes, and doing a one-week paid “internship” granted as a favor through a personal contact. His junior year, he went through fall recruitment, applied to everything on the Internet, he sent out a dozen cover letters and resumes over Thanksgiving, another dozen over Christmas to companies, used personal contacts, had his resume reviewed by career services, talked to his department head, and so forth. This is a child with a decent but not stellar GPA (but above 3.0 cut-off common for engineering) and very long history of successful part-time work experience including the bussing job that he kept all winter. He started the process again with spring recruitment and finally landed an internship offer three weeks ago, with background check and other stuff finalized only a few days ago.</p>
<p>From what I can tell, the competition for these jobs is brutal. His response rate for submissions to jobs posted on the Internet and direct mailings to companies was virtually zero. (One company in Alaska said they would offer him an interview if he paid all of the costs to get there; no phone interview permitted.) Most large companies in his field wont even allow direct resume submissions. That basically leaves on-campus recruiting. Only a handful of companies were coming to his campus with an advertised internship in his major and just getting the interview was a major accomplishment. The interview and offer that actually landed him a job was unadvertised. Increasingly, companies are looking at posted student resumes or asking for professor recommendations and then emailing the candidates they want to interview in a we will call you, dont call us type of thing. </p>
<p>I agree with the poster who commented that lots of full-time jobs now say they require a candidate to have prior internship experience. My older sons firm, also engineering, strongly prefers candidates who have interned directly for them (not just any internship), so they often hire post-graduates as interns before making a permanent offer if the candidate hasnt already served in an internship capacity. This summer his firm only considered interns in grad school, so the bar keeps going higher.</p>
<p>^Internship is very hard to get anywhere in any field. Yes, those who get in usually feel very lucky. Some programs require connections…I hope nobody will try to kill these opportunites by reguiring to pay for this positions.</p>
<p>My D finally landed an (unpaid) internship this quarter after sending out tons of online applications. She got this one at an on-campus networking event. She feels quite lucky. I think being interviewed in person was the kicker. Now she’s trying for summer and has gotten a couple of interviews. The competition is fierce. I think she’d be better off with a paid job, frankly. I am not at all impressed by having to pay for a summer school “internship” class in order to get the college credit.</p>
<p>I think its a matter of branding (semantics). The traditional “internship” or “clerkship”, where a person works in a company, does hands-on work in the industry with or under the supervision of an employee and gets “paid” (hourly or with school/academic credit) is what most strive for. These are, however, in today’s economy, becoming increasingly rare, though do still exist in finance, engineering, law etc. Then there is what sounds more like “shadowing”, where a person follows or observes someone in the field of their choice and gets to observe but not really do much, and is not paid. This sounds similar to premed students “shadowing” a physician. And lastly there is unpaid “work”, where the student is doing actual work, but may be in the capacity as a lab assistant (which can range from doing actual titrations to simply washing testubes or running the autoclave) or an office “gopher” (as is described by the OP), doing a lot of the menial work that others may not want to do. Its definitely work, but its not gaining experience in the field, as the lab assistant may be (or may not, depending on the task). The unpaid slave labor should have a different name. Its not an “internship”. Its free grunt work.</p>
<p>wow Shadow1 - how does you high school get away with that? Its certainly no state requirement for graduation to serve an unpaid internship . Are you sure this isn’t a school “preferance”? I’d be raising hell with your school, principal, board of ed. School districts can take a lot more pushing around than parents realize.</p>
<p>I’d send them my kids college bill that would have been paid with her earnings.</p>
<p>For many employers, this whole high school internships have really soured the experience. Not every teenager, but many of them behave as it is the responsibility of the employer to entertain them and jump through any hoops to accomodate the teenager’s schedule. Especially in hospitals/academic medical centers where local high schools suggest that their students find a lab to work a few hours and do a project for class. There are some kids that really benefit from the experience, but then there are others with arrogant attitude that just want the big name lab to put in their ECs for college application. You know what kid, not only the md, but the lab manager, post docs, research fellows, etc spend a lot of time to teach you how to use the expensive equipment so you can say you are familiar with assays, elisa tests, etc. The kids call an hour, if they even bother to call, before the time they are supposed to come and say, sorry I have to do x with a friend. I have so many similar examples, including freshman/sophomore college students. Unless the internship supervisor is a friend, many people have become annoyed with the ungrateful and full of entitlement attitude of some of the young generation.</p>
<p>As for unpaid “slave labor,” actually that’s the term used in many prestigious academic hospitals for lab employees, usually Chinese, ex-Soviet Republics and other Asian countries, or other nationalities, who have PhD or MD degrees from non-US institutions, many years of experience and only work for health insurance and to obtain legitimate experience in the USA and then in the evening/weekends work a second job to get money. There are many famous scientists who run their labs with such researchers.</p>
<p>“I’m not sure what the technical definition used by the government and all is, but I can fathom a situation where – in all senses – the intern is more a burden than an aid.”</p>
<p>It should not only by fathomable, it is REQUIRED BY LAW. If the company reaps greater benefit than it puts out, it is not an internship, and they are in violation of the law. This isn’t a gray area.</p>
<p>“So the 50% of internships that are paid (using the NYT estimate) shouldn’t be called internships? I used to have to keep an intern busy every summer and the intern’s job certainly met all of the other criteria on Mini’s list, particularly the impeding business part, and they were all well paid.”</p>
<p>This isn’t Mini’s list - this is the law. Internships CAN pay a stipend, or expenses, or whatever. They can’t pay wages.</p>
<p>My son didn’t have any problems getting internships (maybe two
applications) but that was a few years ago and maybe things have
gotten progressively worse. He had a much harder time landing
full-time employment - had lots of interviews and a fair number of
second interviews but he got the job when a former classmate
recommended him to a hiring manager. The unemployment and hiring
environment in our area is decent too.</p>
<p>Your son sounds like he has the characteristics to succeed in that
it sounds like he doesn’t give up. I think that it can be quite
discouraging out there and I always say that you just have to keep
trying.</p>
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<p>I noticed the ratcheting up of qualifications at my workplace
recently. For non-engineering jobs, we used to require only an
undergraduate degree. Now we require an undergraduate degree with some
experience (internships don’t count) or a masters. In engineering, my
local group has hired one with a masters and four with Phds. There
are a lot of Phds or Phd candidates out there looking for work and
we’ll hire them before they are done - they can work for us and work
on their Phd at the same time.</p>
<p>A coworker’s son had an unpaid internship at some Cambridge (MA) Pharma two years ago doing research work and it was a great experience for him. They called him for a paid internship last summer and that worked out well. He got the first one through local ethnic contacts in his town. I was a bit surprised that he had to work that hard to get the internship as he goes to a very well-regarded engineering school.</p>