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The beauty of volunteering is in an opportunity to choose your employer.
I think that is good advice @ucbalumnus and I will remind her of that next summer once she has one year of a top CS program under her belt.
Unpaid volunteering was a ladder that helped me to find employment. I am grateful for it.
Personally, I don’t think that a “paid” internship, is such a good deal. Lets say, $10/hour, 4 hours a day, 20 hours a week, $200 a week, $1,000 per internship … Sorry, but I would prefer freedom to choose my employer and flexibility with job assignments and working hours.
I am thinking that perhaps a bona fide paid internship would be more than $10 an hour and 20 hours a week. That to me is comparable to “stipend” level compensation. I am just guessing here as this is all new to me and we are wading our way through it as our children begin to seek summer employment.
From my perspective as a parent, I just think that there comes a time when you have to encourage your children to start thinking about financial realities. And I think this is true even for families who can well afford to support their kids over the summer months and during the school year.
@californiaaa Do you compare yourself with second, third year college students?
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As a babysitter, student can easily make $15 / hour. As a tutor (Spanish) - $25 / hour. As a tutor (math, science) - $50 / hour. Student in a high-profile college has no problems in finding tutoring gigs (I used to do it).
Volunteering at Google - priceless 
Then go into business for yourself.
That’s what I do-- I’m self-employed but I charge for my services.
If I was an employer, I wouldn’t want to hire someone with your attitude - I would want someone who understand that their job and paycheck came with obligations and responsibilities to the employer in terms of task assignments and working hours. That’s one reason employers look for employment history even for entry level positions. It’s a sign of reliability on a resume that just isn’t established with volunteer work or unpaid internships.
20 hours in half time, not full-time, and $10 is on the low end, but probably more than what my son was earning when he had a half-time position with Americorps. (But Americorps workers are called “volunteers” – so it is clearly a stipend - and they get an additional educational benefit which my son used to pay off his student loans)… However, my son worked for Americorps at the same time as attending school full time, his junior year – and it was a good opportunity for him. But Americorps is a well-established and well-respected government program with a huge alumni network- it certainly isn’t analogous to offering free services to a for-profit company.
I feel like this is some kind of woo thinking here - that working for compensation is somehow evidence that you aren’t as good of a worker as someone who works for free? I think most states are right-to-work now anyway, so even if you come in at the bottom of the ladder, you can quit whenever you want to. You still have to get hired as an intern, it’s not like they take all comers, even when they aren’t paying.
I prefer for my kids to understand their time and labor has value and that they should be compensated for their work.
Don’t forget my kid graduated from college in 2011, so those are old numbers.
Stipend for my creative kid is $5000 for 8 weeks not $1000. Time frame was 2010. Summer internship for CS kid pays about 4-5 times the stipend for creative kid, plus tons of perks and bonus.
Btw, Californiaa, what makes you think you can choose employer even if you volunteer. There’s security issue for other employees, who wants to get an unchecked loony in the company, not saying your kid is, but you never know from the point of view of the company.
With the paid employees, there is recourse. You at least can fire people.
It’s different with the internship your kid got with relative, heck because it’s with relative, I think it’s should not even be called internship.
In your case, I think you probably we’re illegal and either employer didn’t check or the process For checking was not rigorous enough. Either case it’s considered cheating on my book. Cheating the system. No more different like cheating the SAT but I guess you are ok with that.
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Exactly! Paycheck comes with responsibilities. Volunteering / unpaid work is a great time, when one has most flexibility. I would not trade freedom and flexibility for a minimum wage job. Thus, I prefer either a freedom of volunteering or a structured employment with real salary. Low paid internship combines low pay + full load of responsibilities = bad combination (for me). High paid internship, or an internship with a promising employer (paid or unpaid) = very interesting proposition.
Lots of professionals do pro bono work, especially when they develop their client base. For example, attorney and business consultants often help start up companies for free (without any shares), just for the sake of establishing good working relationship.
When my husband was working as a consultant, he was often providing free services.
My daughter went into business with very minimum capital. If you count the video camera worth less than $1000 then that’s it. But according to your post $1000 is nothing. You rather your kid work free for Google. She also built the client base slowly, it does not happen overnight.
My husband was a consultant for a law firm for $800 an hour. Know your worth and charge accordingly.
It sounds like your household like to do things for free.
It’s breathtaking how u crow about your unpaid work experience, like it was some deliberate choice not to get paid in exchange for flexible work hours, when the reality was that you were LEGALLY UNABLE TO WORK. Of course your employer “believed in you” to give you a job. He wasn’t stupid. You were going to do it for free. I’d “believe in” a student, too, who wanted to fold my laundry or paint my fence for free. You were working illegally in US and undercutting the wages of people who could work legally.
You are still conflating the terms “volunteering” and “unpaid work”. Volunteering is when u provide time in a enterprise u have no intention of getting a job nor putting on your resume as WORK EXPERIENCE. No volunteer cites ladling soup in a soup kitchen or walking dogs at the SPCA as “work experience”.
Pro bono is volunteer work with no intention of gain. No self-respecting professional puts pro bono work on their resume in the section for their employment history. Pro bono work gets listed in the section for civic activities.
Agree. However, you can get to know influential people through pro bono work, network, get recommendation letters.
DrGoogle, GMTplus7, we all have different experiences. You don’t like working for free. I don’t mind it. What’s the problem? If you don’t like unpaid internships, don’t take one. Problem solved.
Why should someone forbid me (or my children) to work for free, if we like doing it?
It is funny to be called “cheater” for wishing to work for free.