Students paying to get internships?
nytimes.com
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I am now gainfully employed, but doing nothing related to my undergraduate/graduate education.
I feel for my friends (and others) who had to work all summer, perhaps during the year, without pay in order to pad their resumes.
Internships are also a much better way to screen a potential full-time employee. The company gets 3 months to interview the candidate in a real work environment, instead of a few hours in front of a white board.
In my case (italy) hardly anyone will pay you a cent for your interniship even if you are an engineering, CS or math student.
Often companies (expecially if they are little) here see internship like a way to have free manpower.
Looking from a country prospective, expecially an economic point of view, it's not a long term solution if the majority of your students apply for interniship in a foreign country (even if EU).
Europe is not USA, we are not a single federal country but an "alliance" of many countries with different economies, rules, languages and even cultures which are in many cases an obstacle.
If it would be relatively easy for a californania student to apply for an internship in NY, would not be as easy for a polish student to go and take an interniship in portugal for the reasons listed.
I have typically been treated as a starting employee who's simply only going to be around for 3 months, not an "intern". Maybe this is just West Coast tech companies, I don't know.
Yep. I know some pretty poorly paid programmers.
I am imagining a voice mail like this:
"Hey, Joe [the VP at the PR firm which represents Large Company X], this is Bob, [the internal head of PR from Company X] calling. Would you mind doing me a favor and taking a pass at my niece's resume? She's interested in PR and would love the opportunity to do an internship with you guys this Summer. The pay isn't as important as the experience, and she can stay in her aunt's apartment on the Upper East Side. It's great that we do business together. Talk to you later."
How much has Joe "paid" for his niece's internship?
Of course that pales in comparison to the cost for child care for this year; most of the child care we've looked at in the Bay Area is ~$1700/mo, so her internship is going to cost us about $20,000.
I don't see this system changing anytime soon. As it stands, there are fewer internship slots than there are students. Because it is so competitive, my wife has already been declined by two agencies which had openings directly related to her thesis. I already don't understand how more placements aren't willing to get nearly-free labor, so forcing employers to pay some kind of minimum wage for interns will only reduce the number of slots available to students. Indeed, in addition to all of the indirect costs (child care, etc) we would gladly write someone a check for her to have an internship in the area so that she can finish this year. If she is deferred because there are no placements, it is another year before she starts a "real job".
I see the internship market as similar. How much is it worth in future earnings to directly observe "how the sausage is made" in a Senator's office? To watch a PR mogul operate after Client X is caught on video grinding up cute puppies in a blender? There are many more people who could profit later from these experiences than there are internships to dole out. It is only the relatively constrained supply of good software engineers which prevents Google from charging for the right to spend a Summer there (not that I think it would even if it could).
With the internships, there is certainly not an instant pay off. You pay and receive nothing during which you work to benefit the first. No one is paying you for months on end. There are no nightly tips.
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship...
"I worked on OpenOffice.org providing support for a specific file extension"
"I worked for Microsoft as an intern. I built support for a file extension in Office 11, though it was not used in the final product."
While the first statement has the value of "Let me show you what I wrote", I don't think the second statement is anything to scoff at.
My question wasn't about whether they were paid or not, it was about whether a scrapped feature is still valuable resume experience.
The logic chain is this: If a scrapped feature is still valuable resume experience, then working on a project not deemed worthwhile by a corporation is still valuable experience. If it's still valuable experience, there may be situations in which it is beneficial to take such an unpaid internship.
The whole argument here isn't whether or not to pay interns for such a job. It's already established that they will not be paid for such a position. Either unpaid interns do it or nobody does it. End of story. The question is whether or not to allow people to pursue such an opportunity without pay. I think there are many people that would benefit from such an arrangement. Not just students, but with the high unemployment rates, anyone trying to gain a little more experience or get their foot in the door.
And now, given that one is writing useful valuable software that is of benefit to others, of course the developer should be paid for their work.
Software development is unique in that there are no real barriers to entry. Rather than take an unpaid internship writing code, I can write code at home. But what he wants to provide to aspiring journalists is a space in the locker room after games, access to practices, players and coaches, etc. That's very different.
Also, the premise wasn't useless and unneeded. It was not financially viable. In Cuban's article, he mentions plenty of reasons why it would be useful. But they aren't enough to justify the cost of starting such a project.
The way it works is that the co-op department, CECS, has an internal job posting website, where students view jobs, and submit their resumes and maybe cover letters. The employers will then look at the resumes and decide on the students they want to interview. Most interviews happen in interview rooms in the CECS building. If the employer cannot attend, then Skype or phone interviews are arranged instead. After the interviews, both the students and the employers rate each other 1 through 9, and the students get automatically paired with the job where the sum of the ratings is the lowest. CECS constantly contacts companies to get them interested in hiring uWaterloo students. Companies that currently hire uWaterloo students include FB, Google, MSFT, Apple, all the big banks in US and Canada, Qualcomm, RIM, and tons of other medium and small companies including Allerta, which HN has been hearing about quite a bit, and which is currently employing me. In terms of job locations most jobs are in North America, however there are quite a few in Japan, Germany, NZ, Australia, UK, and students can set up their own jobs if they don't like what's offered through CECS.
Now about salaries, even for a first work term engineering student the range is $12-$22.50 with an average of $15.94. CECS requires that employers pay the students. Until now however there were few exceptions: start-ups were able to discuss with CECS to see if they could offer unpaid internships, however that's now being phased out. If the company can't pay the students with money, it is now required to pay them through other means such as equity.
The latest Earnings Information for uWaterloo can be found here: http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/Hourly_Salary_Information_...
On another note, I think having all these internships spread out, is better for us, students, since it allows us to try out different type of jobs. Once semester you can work for a start-up, while the next one you can work for a big corporate.
EDIT: Even humanities students get paid however relatively less than say, Engineering.
From what I've seen(my undergrad had a similar program), this is actually a very bad deal for many students.
If you do coop, you pay roughly the same price as a 4 year student. (Typically you pay fees in the semesters you are working.) Your financial aid is significantly reduced, since you now have income, so you might even pay the college more money. 5 years after starting college, employers will consider you a better than average fresh grad. (I.e., your salary on graduation won't be ordinary graduate + 2 years worth of pay raises.)
In contrast, if you graduate in 4 years, maybe doing (usually paid, but even unpaid) summer internships, you get more financial aid. 5 years after starting college, you are an engineer with 1 year of experience, and with a commensurate pay raise.
If you work as hard as coop students, you can even graduate in 3 years. This considerably reduces your costs, and at the end of 5 years, you have 2 years worth of pay raises under your belt.
In this economy, it's not usual to graduate in 4 yrs and not be able to find work in your field - even with an engineering degree. The guy with the internship experience under his belt is going to have an advantage in this situation.
Employers these days don't want to invest in training "entry level" employees so getting experience (even if you have to pay for it) is sometimes the only way to get your foot in the door.
The coop office also refused to publish any numbers (in spite of being asked repeatedly), so I suspect there wasn't much of one.
Caveat: this was 9 years ago, and not at Waterloo. But even a few years ago (back when I had students), it seemed like the only people who couldn't find work were the people who weren't very good. Will internship experience help you if you bomb a technical interview?
In my co-op terms, I've worked in enterprise software, gaming hardware, two start-ups and one very hot valley company. Each one has taught me different things, even if it was "I never want to work in enterprise software".
University of Waterloo.
Its quite common. Personally, I have used my own personal contacts to get work experience. But when you involve money into this matter you are just creating more of a gulf between the rich and poor.
It is extremely common across all the industries in London. Very unfair. Media/Journalism is the worst culprits of this.
The catch is that landing the junior year internship in large part depends on having at least one previous relevant internship. That leaves most freshman and sophomores struggling to find internships at local businesses in their field of interest. Most of the businesses don't have an actual internship program, have no idea what to do with an intern, and don't have the money to pay one even if they wanted to.
This describes the experience of me and 95% of my friends at Duke over the last 4 years. Many of us have awesome, extremely high paying jobs lined up after graduation, but we got those jobs as a more or less direct result of working for free after freshman or sophomore year.
My personal experience: Freshman summer: part-time job to support myself, took a summer class, did a lot of (free) work for Duke Student Government Sophomore summer: 3/4 time job as a waiter in a restaurant to support myself. Spent all my free time programming. Junior summer: awesome internship at Microsoft. Post-grad: offers from Google and Microsoft, trying to start my own company.
Basically over the past 20 months or so my pay has gone from ~$6/hr part-time, to ~$75 full time. Trust me, I am not 12-13x smarter, more valuable, or more skilled now than 2 years ago. The system is broken.
Although I never had an unpaid internship my ability to land a paying one after junior year was dependent on the projects I worked on in my free time the previous summer. And that is in the tech industry, which is in by far the best shape. The internship situation in other field (as SandBOx mentioned) is much, much worse.
You're absolutely right that a lot of it is dependent on finding internships early on, but I don't think its necessarily that companies aren't hiring underclassmen (though MS, Google, etc. likely aren't), but rather that a lot of students aren't willing to go the lengths to _find_ the job. Not all of them are posted online. Go to your local PUG/LUG/*UG/2600 meeting, and ask around. Most people there will be willing to talk about one with you if you seem relatively competent and willing to learn what you don't know. Plus, as you said, doing projects in your spare time is a HUGE plus. A lot of the things I end up talking about in interviews are side projects that I've done.
Though I'll put the disclaimer that this is all only applicable to the tech field. Unfortunately, other fields don't have it as nicely as we do.
I took a different route, while in College (in the Florida) I worked full time for the university as a System Adminstrator/Software Developer. I gain 4 years of experience doing it and only pushed my graduation a year back or so. It was hard, work sometimes clashed with school but right after I graduated I had not trouble finding work (I decided to leave the University to explore new stuff, 4 years in one place can get boring :) ).
I would never take an unpaid internship because it's obvious that A) you don't learn anything filing papers all day B) it's obvious employers use this to get free labor even if they aren't supposed to, of course in the tech world we are lucky enough that self learners can quickly get jobs based on skills only. Not so in the other professions I guess.
My alma mater put a similar rule in place regarding study abroad: credits transferring from study abroad programs would be charged at the university's standard rates regardless of the cost of the underlying program. (This was effectively a wash for me, since Japan was a high-cost option, but it was highly detrimental to folks who would e.g. use a year in Israel or any of a few African destinations at $5k to get a year of credit which normally cost about $40k.)
(There is another scenario, in which students -- well, rich parents -- pay brokers to arrange internships for e.g. DC governmental institutions. Someone I know works at one such broker, where commercially reasonable best efforts to find a placement cost about $10k. She's deeply conflicted about their business model and is quitting soon largely because of it.)
I know there are plenty of paid internships out there but companies that offer those do not understand what an internship is or are looking to take advantage. All the paid ones I have seen want you to have either advance knowledge in the subject, x years of experience, and/or previous work history.
It does suck but I am not going to complain I have nothing on my resume so something is better than nothing.
Are the skills required to be a good lobbyist, talent manager, etc. so easily measured in young people? An internship program wouldn't be terribly valuable for Google if only 1/10 interns were regarded as potential hires after a Summer of observation. What are the implications of such relative randomness on rational behavior on a firm's part w.r.t. internship programs?
If, on the other hand, the university or college does not give genuine academic credit but simply notes it on the transcript AND they charge for that notation, it's likely a bum deal.
This is really a consequence of the very weak job market we have now. You can see some people here commenting that they have no problem getting well-paid internships, but this is only true for people who are at the top of the heap, in terms of attractiveness to employers - there are a lot of such people who read Hacker News. Relative to the population at large though, it's a small percentage of the population.
I hadn't heard about this before, but it's an interesting model. Perhaps some day we'll literally be able to trade academic credits like commodities.
CS undergrads here know that and hardly any of them would go for any unpaid internships.