<p>I have a question for those of you who have had kids who took summer internships. I know many of these are uncompensated. But for internships that pay some kind of compensation, what is the range of this compensation for undergraduates? Also is it a good or bad idea to try to get academic credit for summer internships?</p>
<p>Getting academic credit is not a bad idea, but you should check to see if the institution allows it (mine doesn’t). I have an ethical issue with unpaid internships.</p>
<p>The ones I’ve had have either paid by stipend (I do an internship that’s very little work and really just for fun for ~$400 a semester) or by hour. Hourly, I’ve made between $8 and $15 an hour for my internship.</p>
<p>My daughter’s institution (actually, the particular college she is enrolled in within her university) does not allow credit for internships. This makes it impossible for her to be considered for some internships where you MUST receive credit. I do not understand the rationale behind this at all – either from the university’s point of view or that of the organization that sponsors the internship.</p>
<p>As for pay:</p>
<p>In some academic/career fields, practically all internships are paid. My son’s field is computer science; I don’t think those people even get out of bed unless someone is paying them. My son even got paid to spend a summer doing research for his honors thesis. Nice work, if you can get it.</p>
<p>In other fields, many internships – including some that provide very valuable experience – are unpaid. A lot of social science-y fields are like this. My daughter, whose interests lie in the social sciences, has had two unpaid internships in the past and has applied to both paid and unpaid internships for the coming summer. Fortunately, our family finances are such that she can afford to accept an unpaid internship, as long as she can commute to it from home. She only needs to limit herself to paid internships if they are located in another city, where she would have to pay for housing. If she ends up having a choice between paid and unpaid local internships this summer, she can do as she pleases.</p>
<p>Although I can understand the ethical concern about unpaid internships, I don’t feel that it’s fair for a parent to forbid a student from taking an unpaid internship for ethical reasons. That could mean denying the student a valuable experience that might not be available on a paid basis. (Consider, for example, that in many Congressional districts, all internships in the Representative’s office are unpaid. This unique experience is not available on a paid basis. Does that mean that no student should be allowed to have it?) Forbidding a student to take an unpaid internship because the family financial situation does not allow it is a very different matter.</p>
<p>Certainly, you can get some wonderful opportunities through unpaid internship. This harms the company however - they are only pulling from a pool of people who can afford to take an unpaid internship. </p>
<p>Here is the Bates rationale concerning why they will not grant academic credit to internships, even if the internship has such a requirement:</p>
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<p>To be honest, it irks me that a for profit company expects me to volunteer my time for them when they can’t scrap up minimum wage (or even a stipend) for my work. One Day One Internship actually has a really good article discussing the legality of unpaid internships - I’m not sure if I can link to it, but just google “Are unpaid internships illegal?” and it’s the first hit.</p>
<p>S got $10/hr after soph year, for a paid “internship”/summer job in his field. Got $11/hr from the same company summer after jr year. Great resume builder, tech company.</p>
<p>Not at all market-rate for his field - he will be paid >$30/hr as salary in his job post-graduation. This is Engineering.</p>
<p>As an engineering student, I cannot even imagine the possibility of not getting paid for an internship. Last summer, I was paid $16.53/hour for an internship in my field (electrical engineering). This summer, I’m hoping to receive at least $18/hour. That’s still about only half of what the company pays a certified engineer and I’m basically doing the same job than he is. Add the tax deductions the company receives in bonus, and even at $16/hour, it’s a great deal for them.</p>
<p>I realize that not all fields are the same though. I have a friend in Human Resources Management who is currently doing an unpaid internship.</p>
<p>S is CS in engineering. After sophomore year his internship was $18+/hr and after junior year about $22/hr and his post grad job is $31/hr.</p>
<p>Son is applying for an internship this summer with $4K stipend, $1,600 for r&b and $500 for travel expenses. I’d love to do the internship myself as the research work sounds like a blast.</p>
<p>Well, congrats to all those students with paid internships, but are they really the norm?</p>
<p>In our area, there seem to be very few internships that are paid that we are aware of - especially this year…</p>
<p>Our son had an interview last November and we haven’t heard back - they require a security check which can take six months. They said that they would contact him. It’s more of a standard job internship - no idea as to what the pay scale is but pay really isn’t the point. One nice thing is that the work is a short walk from where I work.</p>
<p>I agree on the number of internships available. Numbers seem way down from last year.</p>
<p>Last summer D wanted an internship badly. Since she is just a high school student, she was more than willing to work for free if someone would take her on. She found a mentor who was willing to help her. The mentor thought it would be fair to both D and the company if for the first half of the summer, she learn the ropes and be trained–unpaid. Then once trained and useful, for the second half of the summer she could work for pay. This made sense to us, because the mentor was doing D a favor, and it wasn’t as though after being trained at a loss to the company, D would stay for a while as an employee. However, this ended up not being a feasible plan on paper due to working papers and minimum wage laws. In the end, a solution was arrived at, but I’m not sure what it was exactly.</p>
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<p>“Especially this year” is an important point.</p>
<p>I know of some paid internships that have existed for years but that aren’t being offered this year (or, in some cases, were cancelled after they were advertised) because the company can’t afford them. </p>
<p>On the other hand, an employer wouldn’t have any particular reason to cancel an unpaid internship, I think, unless the amount of productive time that a paid employee loses by having to supervise the intern is greater than the amount of useful work that the intern can perform.</p>
<p>Agreed Marian.</p>
<p>My D has an interview for 2 unpaid internships - one today and one tomorrow. She would be thrilled with either. </p>
<p>What we are wondering is how many hours they would want her for. If it’s unpaid, do they expect full time committment? Her hope (and ours) was that she could perhaps work 20-25 hours at an unpaid internship and 20ish hours at a paid job that she had last year and who wants her back this year. </p>
<p>Guess we’ll know more in the next day after the interviews. Fingers crossed!</p>
<p>Paid internships are the norm for CS, engineering, and other scientific fields. Recruitment for summer internships happens at campus engineering career fairs and during visits from industry reps throughout the year. In addition, professors have research grants that they sometimes use to support student interns.</p>
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S, CS major, got $9/hour for a paid internship (college credit, too) after junior year. His post grad job is about $28/hour.</p>
<p>Dh (an engineer) has had paid interns. He likes them to have at least finished their junior year of college. I think he pays them around $10/hour, but I’m not sure.</p>
<p>I think it’s criminal not to pay kids for “internships.” That said, however, D was lucky in that a private donor set up a fellowship at her college so that FA students could volunteer and do internships at qualified charities. D was able to get one of those, added to her resume, and made more money that summer than she could have made if she had been paid. This is something to check into. There are deadlines for applications for fellowships, but if they are available, one might as well try.</p>
<p>I’ve managed kids on unpaid internships - major pain in the tuckus. They acted like they were doing me a favor by showing up.</p>
<p>If I need workers, I’ll hire and pay them. But they need do the work - or they’re gone.</p>
<p>Deja - The only other distinction I see is that my son did not get any credit for his internship. Maybe that factors into pay.</p>
<p>S though has definitely been in the right field. Sophomore year he was called in December for that first internship. His junior year was not until spring. But this year, in the fall he had multiple companies after him. He accepted his post grad job back on October. Then just last week, we had an unsolicited call to the house from another company wondering if he would be available. In the end we are guessing that if he waited, he would have gotten higher offers but the company he will be working for is the same that he interned for last summer. He really loved the group and ultimately that was more important to him than the pay (in fact he turned down another job w/ comparable hourly pay but included a $5,000 signing bonus).</p>
<p>My point is that strong software skills open a lot of doors. Every company these days has some software needs these days. When S went to the internship and job fairs, software had more possibilities; jobs in science, finance, computers, universities, etc, etc. It is a field to think about. </p>
<p>Side note: D has absolutely NO interest in anything to do with a computer. Down the road I will be helping her to figure out internships in her field of choice. I got it easy with the first kid. :)</p>
<p>S and friend both had internships. S got paid $20/hr for work which he found extremely interesting but did not contribute directly to his academic work. Friend (pre-med) got an unpaid internship in a hospital lab that contributed directly to his senior thesis. Neither got credit for it.</p>
<p>The world of internships is changing pretty quickly from what I have seen. DS is at Northeastern, and their coop/internship model has been changing. This past fall, many students had difficulty obtaining paid internships. I encouraged DS to take an unpaid position if it was in his field, interesting, and they would take him part time. He is doing three days in a great unpaid position and works another paying job for income. Because it is part of Northeastern’s coop program he is getting credit.
There were still some great engineering coops from what I understand but if engineering firms don’t have work, they don’t take interns, paid or not.<br>
We had a paid intern last summer in our business who is a friend of DS. He is a business major at Babson and was unable to obtain an internship. He did a bunch of computer/IT stuff. This summer we won’t be hiring anyone. I’m hoping we can keep the personnel we have.</p>