Post #11. Internship problems.

Hello everybody,

Today I would like to talk about the problem of internship during the pre-graduate or post-graduate period in the contemporary world. I think that that topic is very actual for everybody, especially for us, students, as we are going to face the same problems in a couple of years or less. So, the two main issues of internship are whether to pay for it or not and whether to do it or not at all. Does it really effective and worth to spend your time and powers on it, or not?

I have recently read two interesting essays on this topic, “Take This Internship and Shove It” by A. Kamenetz and “No Pay? Many Interns Say, “No Problem” by J. Halperin. These two essays have a slightly different point of view on the problem of paid or unpaid internship. In the first one, author states that in the USA the division between paid and unpaid is about 50/50. However, she states that unpaid internship has two main disadvantages: firstly, unpaid internships create a lot of literally free labor, which is a contribution to corporate welfare of companies. Of course, it might seem good for companies; nevertheless it is also seem like exploiting workers. The second disadvantage is that unpaid interns have fewer incentives to work more effectively. Here, I do completely agree with Kamenetz. Unfortunately (or fortunately), money is greater incentive than new knowledge, which could be earned during the internship. And great international financer W. Easterly wrote: “People respond to incentives”. That thought is simple and genius: the greater incentives person has - the more effective he or she would do.

On the contrary, in the other essay by Halperin, opposite thought is stated. She says that unpaid internship is very good, better than paid. However, she heavily relies on the couple opinions of the students what did not sound as a strong argument for me. It can be explained quite easily: if we apply some rule (in our case the rule would be that paid internship is good) to the set amount of people, we will always encounter some deviation from that rule. The bigger that amount is, the bigger the deviation is. So, if we take into account that there are huge amount of interns among the U.S., we could easily find some people who do not agree with the rule. But the majority disagrees, and that is the key decision.

Personally, I have never met a single person who would agree to do an unpaid internship. Notice: I do not consider paid internship being rewarded explicitly by money. The reward could be also something like recommendation letter or some other document. In my mind, those things worth much more than just money. Just a short example from my life: before entering NES, I was working as an intern in insurance company. Formally, it was a paid internship, because I received some money every month. But that amount was literally nothing, and the greatest reward was an official recommendation letter which allows me to continue my future career without internship again.

Of course, you may have another opinion on that issue and it would be interesting to hear it J