With the first month of summer complete, some of us are waist-deep in the internships our majors mandate us to perform so that we may graduate. Internships, clearly a heavy-hitter in ensuring post-graduate employment, are our key to success as students. With promises of being flung into higher paying positions and at more prominent employers, internships have become the bread and butter of student existence.
There is an age-old dilemma, however, that the unpaid internships so commonly achieved by undergraduate and graduate students alike is an insult to the typical college student's talents. Contributing skill, sweat, blood and tears to companies and organizations for free means that they get their dirty work done gratis. We all begrudgingly grit our teeth and push through, though, compensating the possibility of precious salary doing what we love by employing ourselves in restaurants, call centers and grocery stores.
This is a struggle we can handle. College students have proven time after time that they can and will tirelessly work minimum-wage jobs all the while supporting full-time academics and an internship or two. However, some programs require an internship to be taken for college credit before graduation is permitted. Most often, this is conveniently fulfilled during the summertime, when students do not have to worry about their 18-credit academic load. This convenience is all but shattered with the requirement that a student must enroll in a more-than $1,000 course to fulfill his or her need for an internship.
It's obvious that an internship ought to be registered through students' respective schools so as to indicate they have achieved some form of non-school-provided professional training, but is it really necessary to charge the full summer tuition amount for a summer internship, something that is already costing students an arm and a leg to maintain without stipend?
Some of us have taken on one or two jobs in addition to our internships in order to pay for the gas to get there, not to mention cost of living. While it's hard enough for students not receiving extra help from their parents to keep an unpaid internship, it's now even harder when the awkwardness of the summer semester makes it difficult to apply scholarship or grant funds that lighten the load.
Additionally, there are some businesses and organizations that abuse students for their willingness (or need) to do free work — oftentimes, this exists in the form of freelancers who are promised payment that is never granted prior to their work being used. This could also come in the form of research assistants who spend semester after semester working in labs with the assurance that, once more money in the budget frees up, they'll start getting paid.
It seems this is a promise that will frequently go unfulfilled. It's so much easier to make students feel unworthy of payment, no matter how talented they may be. It lends itself to creating a stigma that college students aren't worth the struggle they go through to do well, and it reflects very badly on those who fail to reward talent accordingly.
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