<p>Sometimes having that minimum-wage experience helps people make the most of other, more desireable opportunities. My employer runs a summer internship program for high schoolers that is highly sought after, the sort of thing that looks great on a college app. Plus, it pays the students. Most of the high schoolers taking part are bright and hard-working.</p>
<p>Then there was the kid–a rising high school senior-- I supervised about a decade ago. He hailed from a local high school filled with high-achieving kids. The very well-off parents expect their progeny to attend tippy-top schools. My intern seemed nice enough, but he certainly was no go-getter. He never volunteered to do anything, he needed a lot of instruction and reminders. My co-worker and I needed to spend a lot of time supervising him, but he seemed to be getting the hang of doing the work we needed him to do.</p>
<p>I’d scheduled some vacation time partway through the summer, and my co-worker was going to be doing business travel, so we drew up a detailed list of tasks for the intern to complete for the coming week. We went over the plan with him in detail; there was nothing he’d not done before. We emphasized certain deadlines. When we returned, not only was a lot of the work undone, we discovered he’d barely been present, yet he’d filled out his timecard as if he’d been working a full schedule. Serious, serious timecard fraud. Due to the nature of our work and employer, this was an especially, seriously bad thing.</p>
<p>He was fired, of course. Not paid. Subjected to scathing lectures up the command chain. Here’s to hoping he got his act straightened out. </p>
<p>Dbate, this is certainly not you by any measure, but I can see some high school kids thinking that getting into the program was the hard part, and not paying any mind to actually doing the work. My hapless ex-intern probably have been better off starting at a job and work environment that wasn’t quite as lush.</p>