I’m hoping some of you knowledgable parents can help—
My daughter has been submitting resumes and hitting the campus career fairs for summer internships in engineering. She’s beginning to get interviews set up. The school career center has information online about getting credit for internships/co-ops, but internship credit isn’t required by the school for her degree. A fee is charged to get “credit” for internships.
So the question is, is it necessary, required, or otherwise desirable to go through the school to get credit for the internship? Is that totally optional? Is an internship somehow different than a full time summer job in your field?
A secondary question: How have your students handled time off needed during the time frame of a summer internship? I would think it’s preferable to not need any time off for such a short period of employment, but we are trying to plan wisdom teeth extraction, sister’s graduation, and maybe RA training at the end of summer? She, of course, wants to do everything. Except perhaps the wisdom teeth–that she’d rather skip!
Most internships have a set begin date and end date and ought to leave plenty of time for wisdom teeth and RA training. The graduation is a maybe depending on the timing.
Credit- it will depend on the company. Getting college credit is a workaround to allow companies to legally pay less than minimum wage for the workers. In some industries, it is very common (magazines, some media companies). In others it is much less common (banking, engineering). Your D may be lucky enough to have a choice (one of my kids had a choice- credit or compensation and of course he took the dough) but she may not.
And I would think long and hard about having to pay to get “credit” if it’s something more than nominal. If it’s a $250 fee for processing and having a Dean eyeball a description of her summer to make sure it had educational value- sure. But a charge comparable to a full college class? I’d need a lot of persuading on that.
Agree with the above. If your D will not be getting paid or will earn less than minimum wage, some companies do require that they get college credit. The Dean at my S’s college college suggested that he submit the internship credit for his summer work in the following fall and that way we would not be charged for the credit it (he was “allowed” to take 6 classes that semester instead of his normal course-load of 5) so that is a possible workaround if getting a college credit is required.
When he had another internship the following yer that paid well they did not requiter that he get college credit so we didn’t bother putting it on his transcript. As long the internship it is on the resume that is enough.
I dont’ think the credit is important. Northeastern which is a co-op school. Through the school doesn’t give credits for coop even though it’s part of the curriculum. You also don’t pay tuition those semesters. If she doesn’t need the credits to graduate, I wouldn’t bother going through the school to get the credit.
That makes more sense. She’s looking at paid internships, and the fee is in the $300 range I believe to get it on the transcript. Thanks for the explanation!
My kids never bothered with getting approvals thru school to earn credit…It really was not worth the trouble nor was it the purpose for the internship.
S1 had a great paid internship in the summer before freshman year because he has programming skills and is a CS major. He likes to go for the burn and took no time off and scarfed up every hour of overtime they made available. But it’s clear that if he had needed or wanted to take a few days off it would not have been a problem. They understand a student is a student.
$300 is what your D’s college charges to get it on the transcript. If she is getting paid (well) and can also get credit, I would pay the fee. With additional credits, your D may be able to take a lighter load later on or can afford to drop a course in case of bad grade.
Most summer internships run between 6-8 weeks, and most college students have up to 12 weeks off in the summer. We normally take our family vacation beginning of Jun when our kids get out of school, and they do their physical tune ups in Aug before they go back to school. In the last few summers, D2 has been working in the same city where we live, so she has been able to take few hours off here and there for doctor’s appts.
Ditto. DS has a lucrative summer internship and we hope will learn a lot during the 10 weeks. That’s what the internship is about. We never considered getting school credit for it, nor do I think the school would have agreed, had we asked.