Is it a boring place in the middle-of-nowhere? Is it an incubator, sponsored by Harvard/MIT? It may be the greatest opportunity of her life to network and find a 100k+ job.
Startup companies are often very generous with the titles. She can ask for a title of “Marketing Director” or anything else. It may be a nice addition for the resume. Unpaid work is very flexible, it is a nice opportunity to try new skills, that will be listed on resume.
I am really fine with my son doing an unpaid internship. He applied for paid internships also, and he sought out the person and company he will be working for. Going through the process, negotiating, asking for interviews, etc. are all positive things he’d learned to do. It’s something in his field, and he will learn what aspects he likes and doesn’t like. Fortunately, we can supplement my son’s expenses, so he won’t “suffer” for not earning more over the summer.
I am not happy with the unpaid internships for for-profit companies. My son had one, theoretically in his field in NYC while we footed the commuting costs. The company thought it would be a great idea to have the interns hand out flyers on the street for 3 hours a day.
Many of DS’s sophomore friends are doing unpaid internships; some have their expenses (flights, room and board) paid by the school. Most of the paid internships (i.e., arms length paid, not a relative’s company) are kids in CS or similar field.
As a high school student, DS interned at a physics lab (unpaid). Biggest lesson learned was that working in a lab wasn’t for him, but that writing software for physicists was lots of fun and very much appreciated.
My son’s five summer internships (undergraduate and graduate school) ran the gamut from unpaid (2) to barely paid (2) to well paid (1). As resume builders and learning experiences they were all valuable in different ways and well suited to his circumstances at the time.
In the barely paid category, he received a monthly stipend in one case and a contribution to his living expenses in the other. To me, this is the least a for-profit company should do, even it’s a token gesture. Since both were based away from home, the company covered airfare costs.
Principals in a struggling start up may be willing to “donate” their time and energy to the enterprise, but whether it makes sense for an intern to do the same really depends on the ratio between benefit and cost and what other options are available.
If she accepts the position,she could make a few requests that would require little or no outlay from the company, such as a recommendation, networking opportunities, title, job description – and perhaps paid airfare.
Wapo recent article on unpaid internships
And another from WP from Sunday’s paper …
And there’s this one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/12/this-23-year-old-living-in-a-tent-in-geneva-isnt-seeking-asylum-hes-a-un-intern/
In my D’s case she wants to break into the fashion business somehow. It is very much a who you know and who recommends you job market for the work she is hoping to do one day. By taking an unpaid internship this summer at a well respected firm which has a program for interns she will learn skills she needs for the industry and she will make connections with people that she can network with next year when she is graduating and looking for a job. She (and we) think this internship is a win/win. She has spoken with a couple of former interns that only have good things to say about the company. D will also get free clothes which is another great perk for my fashionista kid!
A reason for paying for college credit is that before the affordable care act, you needed to be enrolled in college to remain on your parents health insurance.
When my S did a paid co-op (engineering during the school year), we paid for a 3 credit college class. That kept him a student and he was also eligible to stay on our health insurance.
The ACA changed all that but I remember being very grateful to pay that
My son did an unpaid internship last summer, it was full time but I only paid for one credit. There were 5 interns and there was a lot of mentoring in his academic field; I think it was pretty valuable. He lived at home. This summer he could have been paid at a startup but has chosen to get paid in company stock. Might be a risk but better to take that chance at a summer job. He may be more enthusiastic about the work since he owns a piece of the company. I would not have been happy if he took an unpaid internship where he was just filing or fetching coffee.
FYI
Last year’s 19-page CC debate on unpaid internships:
That already sounds like it violates two of the tenets - “the internship experience is for the benefit of the intern” and “The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded”. This start-up essentially wants some free labor. She might also be unwittingly displacing actual employees, as they might hire someone to do her position if she wasn’t doing it for free.
Also, I really, really wish we would ditch the constant refrain that humanities majors are unemployable and should just take what they can get and grovel thankfully. I know plenty of humanities majors who have done PAID summer and academic year internships. I was a social science major and I never worked an unpaid internship, because I’ve always been against the idea. (Some low-paying, yes, but never unpaid.)
Personally I don’t believe in free labor, but at the very least if there is to be an unpaid internship it should be at an established company with a well-built-out program that is clearly intended to impart some education and training to the student in question. A startup looking for someone to offload some work to a free college student doesn’t fit the bill to me.
Exactly this. They are going to be so busy trying to get their start-up off the ground that they are not going to have enough time and energy to mentor this young woman the way they should, and even if they did they wouldn’t know how. The intern should be mentored by an experienced manager and mentor who has a track record of developing people - or at least by someone who is supervised by that experienced manager.
The size of the company doesn’t matter - I am not interested in giving charity to for-profit companies no matter how big they are.
I don’t like the idea of unpaid internships at all, but that’s coming from the perspective of somebody from a very low income family. I don’t have the time or financial security to put it a dozen or whatever hours a week and not get paid for it. I don’t expect an internship to pay well, but I do expect at least minimum wage (That is, unless there’s room and board provided through the internship). After all, I have rent, utilities, and groceries to pay for.
@bhmomma – your post about the intern living in a tent in Geneva was interesting to me, because my DD interned with a UN Agency in Geneva the summer after her sophomore year, at age 20. Like all the UN internships it was unpaid – but unlike that 23 year old from NZ featured in the article, my daughter is and always has been a planner.- so she worked during the school year to raise the money, and she lined up a wonderful housing situation before she left, subletting a room in a house for a reasonable rate. Certainly the lack of pay for the UN interns was a source of frustration for many at the time, but most were grad students. My DD was one of only a handful of undergrads, and probably the youngest one. So I don’t have much sympathy for that 23 year old who apparently got on a plane to Switzerland without having figure out how to pay for living expenses in advance – it seems to be a no brainer that if you take an unpaid internship in another city, you’ve got to think about finances in advance.
That internship was an enriching and valuable experience for my D, and probably the reason she got her first paid job out of college – with a US-based NGO that works closely with the UN. So in that context it certainly made sense for my D to have done that internship.
However – @nohelicopter – the thing that made my DD’s unpaid internship worthwhile is that it was very special. She had wormed her way as an undergrad into a position usually reserved for grad students, with an agency known and respected worldwide. When she later interviewed for her post-college job, she was asked a lot of questions along the lines of “who did you work with?” – when she supplied names that were familiar to her prospective employers, that was a big boost. So her internship was something that really made her stand out.
The problem with an unpaid internship for a small startup is that down the line, if the start-up fizzles, nobody will have heard of it – and there doesn’t seem like much of a networking opportunity given the small size. Yes, she could be in on the ground floor of something big – and perhaps that is also a direct path into future paid employment there … but more often than not, start-ups don’t make it, and certainly don’t make it big. So while it’s up to your daughter… from what you have described, it sounds a lot riskier.
However, you also wrote that your daughter is able to fund this herself from her school-year earnings – that is what my DD did - and I think in that situation it really should be the student’s choice. Just encourage your daughter to ask a lot of questions about what her work setting and expectations of her assignments and responsibilities would be. And given that it is a small startup, there should be room to negotiate. Perhaps she could talk them into a subsidizing her housing or something similar.
My S did an unpaid internship and it was probably the best 3 months of his life. He LOVED the work and it really showed him what he wanted to do with his life. He was able to live at home and I covered the transportation costs (public transit). He learned tons of life skills (how to navigate public transportation, negotiating, speaking up for himself, present ideas, etc).I am not a fan of unpaid internships but am not opposed to the idea again if the job is something that he really wants experience in. It was really an amazing opportunity for him. He often said he was getting so much more out his internship than they were, even though they weren’t paying him.
The other problem is, if the startup becomes something big, the unpaid intern still gets nothing, unlike someone paid in founder’s stock who may get something out of that (although, at most startups, such stock ends up worthless because they do not succeed).
I’d agree with you, but the stock potential is so speculative that I don’t think it’s really worthwhile for an intern to discuss it. Even if the startup succeeds, it may never go public. I think the intern is better off simply maintaining goodwill with the founding partners, in the hopes that internship could evolve into a paying job and a permanent paid position with the company down the line. At this juncture it could be perceived as presumptuous for her to even ask about that.
I think that in this case, the daughter would be better off focusing on reasonable/realistic requests more in line with the internship – such as asking for housing assistance or some sort of stipend. That is, if they can’t pay her, at least they might be able to offset some of her expenses.
My DD had another unpaid, but not unfunded, internship with a nonprofit after her first year of college. In that case she had secured $3000 of grant funding from her college; the nonprofit did not pay her. At the end of the summer, the director of the nonprofit was so happy with her work that she wanted to pay daughter $1000 as a stipend retroactively. DD contacted the college administrator of the grant funding and asked whether she could accept the money, and they told her that it was o.k – so my DD was very grateful and in the end had probably earned more with the “unpaid” internship than she could have reasonably have expected to earn with whatever sort of paid employment she could have lined up for the summer.
Well, wouldn’t that cash for housing or such turn it into a paid internship?