For all its strengths, one of the reasons I hate AU is the perceived need to have three or four internships to get a good job after graduation.
While I certainly think internships help — I have to believe I didn’t lick those envelopes for nothing, I just have to — I no longer consider them the be-all end-all that so many of my peers make them out to be.
I never realized until this summer how many hardworking ‘Hillterns’ have a tough time translating their getting-yelled at experience into the getting-paid money experience.
Take my first anecdote. An AU student, we’ll call him Steven, spent his summer laboring in a senator’s office in his home city. Then he spent his fall interning in the same senator’s D.C. office, again unpaid.
This looked great on Steven’s resume, in a purely aesthetic sense, but when summer rolled around he found himself working at a bagel shop because he hadn’t heard back from a single internship he applied to.
The bagel shop didn’t hire him because of his ‘Hillterning-ways’, they hired him because he interviewed as an outgoing, competent worker.
But don’t cry for him, or judge him condescendingly. A kid on my kickball team (judge me condescendingly) was waiting tables one night and one of the patrons hooked him up with a job at a large financial institution where he’s now making $80,000 a year, fresh out of college.
Which isn’t to say you wouldn’t make great professional contacts chatting your life away at the Department of Labor, but since so much of life is based on chance encounters, why spend it in a cubicle?
I have taken an informal survey of my least formal peers and have come to the definitive conclusion babysitting is the only way to achieve Nirvana.
To those babysitters who have yet to discover the path to freedom from suffering and will complain about obnoxious children, I will remind them that, while children are by nature sometimes unbearable, office managers choose to be unbearable. The menial tasks of interns are well documented, so I won’t delve into those soul-crushing depths. Anything for a buck, though, right?
Well, in 2010 the New York Times reported anywhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of internships are unpaid, and by my estimates nearly 100 percent of those were illegal. I base that on the Labor Department’s criterion for legal unpaid internships: “The employer … derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.” Creating databases of media contacts may not be too hard, but it is helpful to the company.
Anyway, I promised the editor not every one of my columns would cite the Labor Department, and that’s something I’m going to work on.
Keep in mind, however, while interns volunteer their time away for the reward of being treated like 7-year-olds, others are treating 7-year-olds to ice cream and getting paid upwards of $20 an hour doing so, and most at least $15.
Many do so poolside, books in hand, letting the lifeguards ensure all parties are employed the next day.
Others spend their summer afternoons at more hellacious places of screaming children such as playgrounds.
But as John Milton wrote, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” And to call the Hill Heaven is as inappropriate as calling ‘Hillterns’ slaves, and not nearly as accurate.
