<p>Blossom, I think you may have misunderstood me or I wasn’t that clear. I am all for unpaid internships!!! I am NOT for paying to do them as the article discussed! My kids have done very low paying internships and I would also not be opposed to unpaid ones except in their case, they have done them away from home and we do not pay for their summers while in college and so they have had living expenses and so while they are not looking to profit, they do have to cover the expense of taking the internship if it is away from home (all of theirs have been away from home). </p>
<p>However…let me explain a few of them so I don’t make it out to be that they were looking to MAKE money as what they were looking for was the EXPERIENCE as you have described. They just could not afford for it to COST them money for that experience and we will not fund summer experiences now that they are in college. </p>
<p>D2, summer after freshman year, got a summer stock job at a small Equity theater in another state. Her official position was “intern”, though she was in their professional shows but not paid as the other professional actors were paid. She was paid next to nothing per week but was given free housing and so her measly stipend went toward food and the internship did not cost us money and she, nor we, cared about her coming away with a profit. Since then she has worked in her field every summer in NYC, but her jobs have all been paid and she doesn’t have intern status and actually is paid quite well. </p>
<p>D1 has had three internships in the past three summers in her field, architecture. The first one was in Paris and did not pay a lot but paid enough to cover her housing, food, and incidentals. We had a frequent flyer free ticket and allowed her to use it to get over there. She did not make a profit but the job did not cost her money. Second internship was in NYC and that one paid a decent amount, enough to cover her expenses of living in NYC and she had a little left over at the end. The third internship is one she found in the French Alps this summer. She likes the experience of being in another country as a plus on top of the great internship experience in her field (and can travel around Europe on her weekends or when the internship ends). While she found the internship on her own, it did not pay enough to take the job. However, her grad school, MIT, (this ties in with jyber’s post!!) has an office called MIT France, which will help fund summer internships and the like and so MIT paid for my D’s flights to Europe and supplemented her internship salary enough to make the wage enough to live on all summer and that is how she was able to take a low paying internship but not have it cost any money at all to do so. It was a very nice plus on her last day that her boss gave her one month’s salary as a bonus however and so now she did make an unexpected small profit! She says she plans to likely work overseas the next two summers of grad school knowing that MIT will help fund such experiences for her. She was going to maybe work on an architecture project as an intern in Rwanda this summer but needed it to be completely funded in order to do so and applied through another office at MIT that also funds such internships but was unaware of yet another office that had an application for such funding and it was late and so she did the France internship instead but may look into the Rwandan one next summer by knowing all the offices at MIT that helps to fund such internships (again, she found all the internships on her own independently but MIT helps with funding as Smith does in jyber’s note). My D’s internships in Paris and NYC were prior to her attendance at MIT, however.</p>
<p>Again, while an unpaid internship is valuable experience, my D not only has worked for private firms, but we cannot afford to pay for her internship experiences away from home. She doesn’t care if she makes a profit but must cover the expense of living wherever the internship is located. She has now gained three valuable internships in her field and has two summers to go before she graduates with her MArch degree. It has worked out great and has not cost us any money, nor would we pay for such experiences past the high school years. My other D has worked in her field (theater) every summer during college and it has been away from home and has not cost us any money. At this point, she is actually making a profit after her living expenses in NYC and she is only 20.</p>