2008 Woodie Awards
Costly experience
Joel Cohen
Issue date: 6/12/08 Section: Opinion
Paying to work. Sound like a new work-at-home scheme? Think again. This is the norm for thousands of college students take each year in the form of unpaid internships.
According to the career information website Vault, 84 percent of all college students surveyed in 2006 planned to complete at least one internship before graduating. About half of these are unpaid.
At my (unpaid) internship at The (Baltimore) Sun, many of my fellow interns pay more than a thousand dollars to participate in the internship program because they need the credits as part of their major.
At this university, journalism students are required to take JOUR 396/399: Supervised Internship, and many other colleges within the university have similar requirements. Since many students decide to complete internships during the summer, in-state students are paying anywhere from $273-$819 to fulfill this requirement. And that's just in-state. Out-of-state students are paying anywhere from $902-$2,706 to fulfill this requirement. Add to this the price of gas, and one could easily be out thousands of dollars during the course of the summer.
Sadly, this is the norm rather than an exception. According to Slate Magazine, a student at Bucknell University has to pay anywhere from $286-$1,074 in order to participate in a for-credit summer internship.
Luckily for me, I am not a journalism major. Because of this, I was able to take advantage of the University Career Center's no-credit internship class UNIV099: Internship Seminar, which allowed me to participate in an academic internship by only paying a $30 application fee. (In the land of internships, I have learned the hard way that "academic" is a fancy euphemism for "non-paying.")
Internships are a valuable tool for career exploration, and the university should be doing more to encourage its students to participate in them. Sure, the Career Center can help find you an internship, but what about after that? Besides sending you the tuition bill in the mail, you are on your own. But this doesn't need to be the case.
According to the career information website Vault, 84 percent of all college students surveyed in 2006 planned to complete at least one internship before graduating. About half of these are unpaid.
At my (unpaid) internship at The (Baltimore) Sun, many of my fellow interns pay more than a thousand dollars to participate in the internship program because they need the credits as part of their major.
At this university, journalism students are required to take JOUR 396/399: Supervised Internship, and many other colleges within the university have similar requirements. Since many students decide to complete internships during the summer, in-state students are paying anywhere from $273-$819 to fulfill this requirement. And that's just in-state. Out-of-state students are paying anywhere from $902-$2,706 to fulfill this requirement. Add to this the price of gas, and one could easily be out thousands of dollars during the course of the summer.
Sadly, this is the norm rather than an exception. According to Slate Magazine, a student at Bucknell University has to pay anywhere from $286-$1,074 in order to participate in a for-credit summer internship.
Luckily for me, I am not a journalism major. Because of this, I was able to take advantage of the University Career Center's no-credit internship class UNIV099: Internship Seminar, which allowed me to participate in an academic internship by only paying a $30 application fee. (In the land of internships, I have learned the hard way that "academic" is a fancy euphemism for "non-paying.")
Internships are a valuable tool for career exploration, and the university should be doing more to encourage its students to participate in them. Sure, the Career Center can help find you an internship, but what about after that? Besides sending you the tuition bill in the mail, you are on your own. But this doesn't need to be the case.
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