COLUMN: The Internship Squeeze

From Abby Beshkin's "All Set," Fall '95 From Abby Beshkin's "All Set," Fall '95The Boston Globe ran a rather cute feature this summer called "Where They Worked on Their Summer Vacations." It was a sort of rags to riches story which described the jobs some of Boston's most prominent people held while they were in high-school and college. Boston's mayor spent a summer cleaning furnaces. The chairman and CEO of State Street Boston once manned the shooting range at an Idaho resort. The CEO of Staples Office Supply Stores spent a summer mixing fertilizer. But ever since I started Penn, I've been reading many articles bearing the ominous news -- there are few jobs for college graduates. Career counselors, professors?just about everyone, really, is calling internships a must. It seems like students who graduate having spent their summers waiting tables are miles behind all the others who were both willing and able to have what is now a staple of the college career -- the unpaid internship. And while internships can be a priceless opportunity to gain some work experience during college, the bottom line is, many students are spending their summers working for free. According to a 1994 survey put out by CPPS, almost 28 percent of the incoming seniors who responded worked for free, or for under $500 for the summer. The discrepancy strikes me. On the one hand, we go to Penn and are told that the work we do has value. Be it academic, artistic or athletic, it is among the best in the country. But then summer comes, and suddenly our work is not worth a penny. What's even more mind-boggling is the competitiveness of the internship search. Dozens of people vying for a job where either they're doing the "dirty work" no one else wants to do and not getting paid for it, or they're doing the same work full-time employees are doing -- only they're doing it for free. My internship two summers ago at the "Fresh Air" show on National Public Radio was, perhaps, the most valuable experience I've had. In those three months, I learned a tremendous amount about researching, interviewing and editing a piece of journalism. On a more profound level, I learned what it means to work in a high-caliber setting in which people have to be smart and creative and discerning all the time. While I was working, and even now in retrospect, it never bothered me that I did not get paid for this internship. I was grateful for the chance to be their intern. The experience was entirely worth it, and I saw it then as I see it still -- the way I was supposed to spend a summer in college. But while it didn't bother me, it completely changed my concept of the meaning of work. I have lately wondered about the value work has assumed if it is so routine for people to do it full time, for free. I find it wrong in some way that students like me do it cheerfully, gratefully and are not indignant over working forty hours a week, unpaid. I realize the job-market has become so competitive that there is no turning back -- now there will always be someone willing and able to work for free. One CPPS internship counselor pointed out that more and more companies were moving toward paid internships again, and there still remain some wonderful internships that are paid. There are even some fine programs that fund students to take internships that would otherwise be unpaid. But with the cost of college, working for free is still a lot to ask of any student. Will the job market of our generation be filled only with those who can afford to work unpaid for an entire summer? We're not just college students --we are the incoming workforce, and the work we do now is valuable, just as it will be in a few years. Yet we're entering the work world with the notion that we're worth little more than a grade on paper.