Alright, sophomores and juniors – it’s that time of the year again. No, not Halloween, not fall break, not even just autumn. It’s time to start looking and applying for internships. You thought you were done with that nerve-wracking application process until you graduated and had to enter the big bad real world? Think again. The real world is catering to college students, and it’s in the form of mostly unpaid internships piled on top of highly competitive fields.
Internship Culture in Modern-Day America: a play in three acts. The scene: A UA student applies for and gets into a great internship program in her field in New York City. She is qualified, competent, smart and a hard worker. Her family is also poor, and the internship doesn’t cover airfare, meals, housing, or other “extraneous” expenses. Whatever can our heroine do? Well, she could take out loans only to have them catch up to her once she graduates. She could try and save all her money and maybe scrape by in the Big Apple. Or she could not go and stay at home while her equally qualified but richer friends travel to London, Boston, L.A., or any other number of big cities with higher costs of living. The curtains close on our star weeping all alone, woeful for what might have been had she just been born into high society.
Was the above a dramatization? Yes. But only a little bit, and that’s the sad part. I don’t know how or when it happened, but internships stopped being solely a competition for the most qualified and started tacking on variables of wealth and whom you know. There are scholarships out there for lower-income students, yes, but it’s almost depressing how poorly advertised and put out there they are. If I’m the best journalism student the University has ever seen but I’m poor and don’t know any means of financial aid, it doesn’t seem to matter.
Internships have got to stop being a way for certain companies to get free, unpaid lab rats to fetch coffee and make copies. I know someone whose internship literally consisted entirely of her making coffee and occasionally working with her supervisor. Now, working a coffeemaker should be something every adult knows how to do, but you shouldn’t have to report 30 hours a week to learn it.
There is raw skill out there in every field, and likewise, there are those who simply cannot afford to travel to showcase it. Universities and companies alike should be going out of their way to accommodate these students and make sure they get the work experience they deserve, and are qualified for, before they’re ejected out into the workforce. Otherwise college students are all just running around with our heads chopped off for nothing, and you really, really don’t want to be around when we realize that fact.
Beth Lindly is a junior majoring in journalism. Her column runs biweekly on Tuesdays.
