Some college students and recent grads now paying to get unpaid internships!

<p>Maybe W&M wasn’t one of those targeted schools for ibanking. If that’s the case it is very hard to get an internship at those banks coming out of non-targeted school.</p>

<p>soozievt - I was speaking only to comfort those who have to work (who can’t do an unpaid internship) to let them know that some employers highly value real-world work experience.</p>

<p>Just in case some people are concerned that they have to work, so they think they can’t do an unpaid internship, I’ve known students who’ve worked an unpaid internship while also working a paying job. For some fields like broadcast journalism, it’s virtually impossible to get a job unless you’ve had an internship, yet almost all of the broadcast journalism internships – even at major networks – are unpaid.</p>

<p>Wow. That’s really ridiculous to make someone pay for that. I saw a tutoring job online recently. I think it was called ‘Where’s My Tutor’ that pays good money to students for being tutors…but…they make you pay a yearly membership fee of $15. Why in the world would someone looking for a job to earn money pay money to get the job?</p>

<p>Soozievt - your daughter did have a connection for her first job with an architect - location, they lived in the same small town. Just because there’s a connection doesn’t mean their parents made the contacts. My husband won’t see/hire a kid who doesn’t call him but because they/their parents know my husband is why he will see and most likely hire him/her for an internship. Initiative always puts someone at the head of the line!</p>

<p>Northstarmom - at my daughter’s internship this past year she was amazed that some college grads working the unpaid internship had to work one or two jobs in order to survive while taking this special opportunity. It was a dose of reality for her.</p>

<p>That’s just pathetic</p>

<p>amtc, it is true that we live in a small town and so when my D was sixteen and worked for a few weeks for an architect and with NO experience, they would have an inkling of who she was when she wrote many architects in the town. We were not involved in the slightest and nobody recommended her to the firms but she wrote them independently. However, this thread and the article, were talking of internships as college students and after college. In that vein, my kid had no connections. Her first internship for an architecture firm, while a college student, was in Paris and she knew nobody and there was no advertised opening but she wrote them cold and did a cover letter and resume in French. And so it has been since then…including this summer in the Alps…she researched architects and wrote them through no connections or no known openings. They were even out of the country. While the internship at age sixteen was an internship, it was nothing that matters in the scheme of getting jobs as she had no tangible skills or experience. What gets her the jobs now are her educational background and the internships she has had during the college years.</p>

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<p>It is the same in the print media. Internships are very hard to get and the “best” ones go to kids with connections.</p>

<p>Personally, I find this development very disheartening. Understand my starting point: I didn’t appreciate the advent of “unpaid internships” because the expectation discriminates against middle-class and lower-class students whose famillies need them to work for cold cash each summer. </p>

<p>To charge for an internship at a for-profit company takes it on to another level. </p>

<p>How clever of a for-profit company to transform labor costs into a revenue stream, catapulting it onto the other side of the ledger. </p>

<p>Do their shareholders know and approve? Or are they trying to jockey for those positions for their own kids?</p>

<p>And how do they spell the name of this piece of money that changes hands on the first day of the parent-paid internship? Oh yes, b-r-i-b-e What else to call it when educational opportunities prerequisite to employemnt are available only for sale to the highest bidder? </p>

<p>In the Middle Ages in Europe, parents paid the guilds to train their sons to learn a trade, serving as a working apprentice to a cooper, blacksmith, or silversmith. That was instead of, not in addition to, the costs of buying a university education, which led on to different occupations. </p>

<p>Now we have companies who’ll take money from families, or, even nuttier, the families who’d enable it by forking it over. </p>

<p>Personally I’d have no respect for a student working around me, knowing his parents had paid for him/her to be standing there. One of the motivators of work is to earn money. There are many days when I’d say to myself, “this job is wretched/boring/difficult…but I can stand it another hour/day/week because I’m earning necessary money.” That’s part of developing work ethic, to feel that. If
someone bypasses work ethic by buying their way into interesting jobs, how will they learn to cope when their midlife positions are less-than-scintillating. </p>

<p>Also, if the student quits mid-summer, does the family get a refund or do they owe the company more for breaking a contract? ;)</p>